"Tiny Survivors" is an unabashed, lazy ripoff of Vampire Survivors (Copyright Poncle, 2021) (and possible also an asset flip). Many lazy "amateur" developers don't pay attention to their obligations under copyright law, and often steal the ideas of actual, real game developers without credit, such as the "developer" here has done.
Putting aside the unethical intellectual, creative and moral bankruptcy of stealing someone else's game concept, this is also breaking that unwritten law of stealing other people's game ideas... you should at least try to do better than the game you're ripping off. "Tiny Survivors" is considerably worse than Vampire Survivors.
Before we get into the facts about this particular background, and while it's vital that reviews must be about the game and not the developer (and this will cover the game thoroughly), I think it's important to let gamers know about problematic, unethical developers (and even criminal ones). I personally won't buy games from unethical developers, I prefer to support ethical developers. For that reason, I want to know when there is an ethical problem with a developer, and I think it's good for other gamers to know this, too. And in this case there is... the developer is an outright copyright thief and plagiarist.
He stole a game from Itch called "Dire Decks" from a genuine amateur developer, kindanice, put his own name on it, and tried to get YOUR money from stealing someone else's entire game code. You can read about it (if Valve allows PCGamer articles) [url=https://www.pcgamer.com/games/card-games/dire-decks-wildcard-clone/]here.[/url]
That's not just unethical... copyright infringement such as the developer is responsible for here can carry penalties of up to $250,000 and 5 years in prison. I would never support a "developer" who did this, and you shouldn't either.
Now that's out of the way, let's talk about this garbage.
This features really godawful pixelcrap "art" instead of real graphics. It's hard to say if this was because the developer didn't have the skill to do the job of creating 3D visuals, or couldn't afford to hire someone who does, but it also doesn't matter. What matters is that this looks much worse than most other games because of that decision, and that's a major deterrent to gamers. Games like Terraria and Stardew Valley succeeded [i]despite[/i] the bad graphics, not because of them.
The developer chose not to do the job of a real game developer and create meaningful bespoke levels, narrative based gameplay progression and so on. Instead, they decided that "Procgen IS content!" and lazily tried to use procgen algorithms to create infinite, samey, repetitive, soulless levels, because that's a lot less work.
As a result of this poor decision, the game gets tired and repetitive almost immediately. Developers must learn that procgen is a terrible substitute for creating real content. It should not be used as "ez-mode" for content creation, as the developer tried to do here.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
This is "free" enough (not every "free" game in the "free" section is truly free, there's usually some hidden price tag), at least you won't be expected to spend any more money after you download this, but just because something is free doesn't mean it's good, and the cost of a game is more than just financial, your time is valuable too.
Bearing in mind that free games don't add +1 to your game collector count, should you bother adding this to your library and downloading it? What's the verdict?
Nope. There's no up front cost here, but I still feel like I got ripped off almost as much as kindanice, and I didn't even spend any money. That's how bad this is.
