Upstream Ante

Lucky me gets the dubious honour of being the first to review more shovelware... this time, "Upstream Ante". Upstream Ante could be described as Balatro from Temu, but even that is being far too kind... this is a very badly made 1v1 (player vs AI) hold'em poker game with a couple of "gimmicks", eg "angel" and "devil" cards that help or hinder you, and a slew of ridiculous technical problems... like for example the total amount of money owned by both players in a round varies... which means the developer couldn't even work out the mathematics right. Money shouldn't be created or destroyed during a poker game! And that's just the tip of the iceberg... this game is a complete train wreck that doesn't even function properly in the very basic role of being a poker game. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result. There's an ugly screen filter meant to make the game look even more obsolete... like the game looks bad enough already, but they actually went out of their way to make it look worse. There's no way to turn this off. 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 controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just point and click stuff like a browser/Flash game. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here. For gameplay purposes, because the user interface for this game is mostly just 2D static text/images... it might as well be a web page. It's functionally no different from a browser game. And we all know, Steam isn't here to compete with Chrome and Firefox. If the game can be done in a web browser, it's just not rich or compelling enough to appeal to serious gamers on PC. Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the video game library/engine, GDevelop/Electron (intended for HTML5 games). It's rarely used, because it's arguably worse than construction kits like GameMaker Studio, RPGMaker and Clickteam Fusion, but it's also much harder to work with. Despite this, Godot has very limited capabilities, which go some way to explaining the poor quality of the game. 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. Upstream Ante 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 "High roller", winning 100k, trivial to get, but less than 24 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 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 110,000 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 110,000+ games on Steam? Upstream Ante has the completely unrealistic cash grab price of $15 USD (potential scam pricing), 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 "Halo: The Master Chief Collection", "Hunt: Showdown" or "Remnant: From The Ashes". No pixelcrap is worth $15. If developers want to get paid the same kind of money as real game developers who know how to do graphics properly, they need to learn how to do graphics properly. [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]

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