"The Legend of Azarias Rebirth" is a construction kit copy + paste game. The "developer" used the craptastic Smile Game Builder video game construction kit, copying + pasting and arranging premade assets, using premade level design tools so they could pretend they're an actual game developer. Filling out a construction kit template and copy + pasting stock assets from the kit and pretending to be a game developer is not that much different from outright asset flipping. In fact you could even argue the asset flippers sometimes put more work into their use of the assets they stole off the internet. This kind of lazy construction kit spam is a disservice to gamers and it takes away from the hard work done by genuine indie developers.
A strong argument can be made that construction kits like Smile Game Builder should never be used to make games for profit, as the "developer", Michael Richard Lannon has done here. These construction kits are intended to teach people some of the basic principles of game development, and to make small demos to pass around with friends. They're not intended to replace to actual work of real, professional game developers. So it's inappropriate when amateurs try to use these for profit, without any actual, real game development effort taking place. This doesn't result in products that have any real meaningful value for gamers.
This construction kit/asset flip was made with the rarely used, but still completely terrible ripoff of RPG Maker, Smile Game Builder. It's basically the same thing but worse. Like RPG Maker, there's a 3D engine that can be used to make ripoffs of Might & Magic, which is what has happened here. A badly written and badly translated high school tier anime club fanfiction accompanies the copy + pasted stock assets to create what can only be described as garbage.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
The game features lazy low-polygon "retro" assets with crap 2D retro pixel "art" textures on them, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the early 1990s. This very poor quality visual style is a method that lazy devs often use to disguise their lack of talent/interest in doing the graphics properly and trying to disguise it under the name of "art", or "We made it look bad on purpose", which really isn't something gamers should have to put up with. It's unclear why the developers weren't willing to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets and high resolution textures for the game. It looks bad as a result of their decisions, worse, it doesn't authentically recreate the 1990's vibe the developer is hoping people will accept instead of doing their job properly, and that's just another reason to avoid it.
The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the game all-time peak player count was only ONE player. That's right, only one person ever played this at a time. When I played this for the purposes of reviewing it, I equalled the peak player count for the game. OUCH. The only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
"The Legend of Azarias Rebirth" has the eyewatering, delusional price of $15 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend.
For comparison, the $15 asking price for this game could get you games like "Metro Exodus", "Kingdom Come Deliverance" or "Ghostrunner". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.
[quote][b][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/b]
Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.[/quote]
