Topper Carrier was an unabashed, lazy ripoff of Outrun (Copyright Sega, 1986). 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. At this stage no legal action has been taken by Sega against the "developer" here, but it's never off the table, as previous copyright law cases have shown. Putting aside the unethical intellectual bankruptcy of stealing someone else's game concept for profit, this was 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. Topper Carrier was considerably worse than Outrun.
From a technical perspective, the game didn' meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
There was no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There was no way to ensure this was running at the native resolution of your display. There was no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
The game featured somewhat lazy, simplistic 2D graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort Flash/browser games and mobile apps. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing.
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, or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the poor choice of using node-webkit/NW.js instead of a serious game engine. This is a very poor quality toolset for gaming, sometimes used by amateur developers as it doesn't require advanced game development skills, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities because it's primary function for games is to make simple HTML/browser/simple mobile apps rather than full fledged PC games (and given we are here for PC games, you can see why this is a problem). Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The game has been removed from Steam by the developer, either because of a legal cease and desist, or the developers coming to their senses and removing the game before they encountered legal action from Sega. This had the perhaps unintended result of slightly improving the overall quality of the Steam store. Even if you can get a key to this game (the developer continues to sell keys to the game on third party websites), you should avoid it.
[b][quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/quote][/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.
