UltraGoodness 2 is basically a lazy cash grab, it's a pointless 2D retro top down shooter slapped together with Construct, the "game construction kit" designed for children... there's no need to do any code in Construct, it's a drag and drop construction kit. And these guys wanted a whopping $5 for it, as if it was a real game.
Taking this garbage seriously, it's an incredibly crap top down twin stick shooter with one simple gimmick, time goes a bit slow when you aren't moving... this is basically ripping off the concept of Superhot, only laughably bad. But the humour dries up when you remember these guys are trying to get paid for this garbage, it's their business model.
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 somewhat lazy, simplistic "retro" looking 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, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
The game features no proper level design or game/story flow/plot, as they opted to try to use samey repetitive procgen algorithms as a substitute for adding such content to the game, to avoid doing the important job of level/map design. As a result, the game doesn't actually have any content worth mentioning, just endless, boring, repetitive, soulless algorithmically generated sameyness. Developers must learn that procedural generation is not an acceptable substitute for content.
Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the Construct 2/Construct 3 game engine/toolset. This is a very poor quality toolset sometimes used by amateur developers as it doesn't require advanced game development skills, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities (it's worse than GameMaker Studio!). 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.
UltraGoodness 2 didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the game, either. It has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game didn't really capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is "King of Violence 1/5", playing this garbage Construct 2 template flip, trivial to get, but less than 34 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. Hardly a success story, even the people who own this game weren't interested in it.
The poor quality of this game is also reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was [b]only 2 players[/b]. This is a remarkably low number, and now, 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 130,000 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 130,000+ games on Steam?
UltraGoodness 2 has the almost comically optimistic (if it wasn't so sad) price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam.
For comparison, the $5 asking price for this game could get you games like "Warhammer: Vermintide 2", "Assetto Corsa" or "X-Com 2". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.
It's important to note that, despite this being such a low quality product, there's a number of positive reviews that all appeared immediately after the game launched, from suspiciously inactive Steam accounts that have reviewed almost no other games apart from this. On a purely unrelated note, recent US FTC rulings mean that review manipulation and fake reviews are now federal crimes. Interesting, isn't it? Regardless... take the review score of this game with a grain of salt.
