VINE is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere.
This is a dead boring 2D retro pixel platformer where you control a frog and must negotiate various hazards. There's a "swing" gimmick where you can use the frogs tongue, but otherwise this has no other differentiators from the other thousands of platformers that gamers ignore on Steam.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The developers didn't design the game for modern gaming PCs, as such the display resolution caps out at around 1440p, there's no support for the state-of-the-art 4K or higher resolutions. The game simply won't look right on modern gaming displays due to this failure on the part of the developers.
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.
While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals.
This looks a lot like it was designed for consoles, but released on Steam instead by mistake. While this is on PC, it has all the hallmarks and deficiencies of a console game, from the clunkier than needed control scheme to the less than cutting edge graphics. There's 10's of thousands of PC games on Steam, and PC gamers deserve only the best. This might not appeal to many gamers due to the lack of PC-centric design. It's unclear why this never made it to the video game console appliances it seems to have been designed for.
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 all-time peak player number was only 8 players. 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 110,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
The game contains stock/store assets/libraries/packages, but the "developer" here hasn't credited the people who actually did the work for the game. In some cases this breaches the license agreement the developer signed for the use of those assets. Worse, some of the assets are licensed under a [b]NON-COMMERCIAL AGREEMENT[/b], but the developer is violating those licenses [b]FOR PROFIT[/b]. This is not just a contractual/license breach, in many jurisdictions this is a breach of criminal law.
Claiming credit for the work of others as well as breaching software licenses and breaking the law is highly unethical.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 110,000+ games on Steam?
VINE has the comically over-optimistic 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, and the questionable ethical nature of the developer and/or their associates (as outlined above), this is impossible to recommend.
For comparison, the $15 asking price for this game could get you games like "Remnant: From The Ashes", "Valheim" or "Hunt: Showdown". 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]
