Lucky me gets to be the first person to warn people away from "Win the Diamond".
Win The Diamond is yet another of literally thousands of (3D rendered) 2D retro platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. This is an incredibly amateurish mess... I wouldn't go as far as calling this a direct asset flip but the platformer engine is obviously a stock Unreal one, and the background textures etc are definitely not the work of the "developer" here, but also uncredited, so there's a little plagiarism going on. However the main character assets were obviously handcrafted because they're completely awful.
It's a very basic platformer, you run, you shoot, you jump into coins. The game is very simplistic, small and limited in scope and ambition. This feels more like a tech demo, proof of concept or student homework assignment rather than a fully fledged product designed for PC gamers. As such it doesn't offer any real value as a serious PC game.
The gameplay is on-par with the absolutely awful amateur game assets. Absolutely awful, too, it's janky and unpleasant to play. The developer couldn't even work out how to sync the sounds with actions properly, so you hear the "boing" from jumping a little while after you actually jump. They seriously want money for this.
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.
Controls are likewise locked... in fact there's no options menu at all so PC gamers are left bereft of any ability to customise this to make it seem even slightly better. It's just not.
The game features lazy low-polygon "retro" assets, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the mid 2000s. It's unclear why the developers weren't able to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets for the game, and also irrelevant... what matters is that this looks bad as a result of their decisions, a compromise PC gamers shouldn't have to put up with.
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 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 100,000 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 100,000+ games on Steam?
Win The Diamond has the almost scam-like price of $20 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, this is impossible to recommend. Usually I would point to an unusually high price on garbage like this to be some kind of money laundering or an attempt to inflate the price to prevent genuine reviews from diluting paid for review manipulation, but that's not present here (this review being the first review of all). So in this case we can probably just put the pricing down to incompetent delusion.
For comparison, the $20 asking price for this game could get you games like "Prey", "Frostpunk" or "Dead by Daylight". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.
[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]
