WireNet is a badly made GameMaker Studio (ugh) based arcade shoot 'em up with deplorably bad, lazy artwork, imbalanced and unenjoyable gameplay, and pretty much some of the lowest production quality I've seen for a long time, including the "joke" games that routinely get dumped on Steam as lazy cash grabs. This arcade shoot 'em up has you guiding a blob and shooting other blobs while avoiding blobs. Yeah, turns out graphics can help players see what's going on when they're done right... and, in games like WireNet, just make things worse when done badly.
So even in terms of fundamental game design, this is an immediate fail, let's go into the long list of technical defects and shortcomings.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The graphics here are some of the worst, laziest attempt at video game "art" I've ever seen. It's hard to suggest this game even has graphics. It's just untextured, basic pixel blocks and blobs, the kind that an infant child might be able to create in 5 minutes on MS Paint. It's clear the developer didn't even try to produce any real graphics for the game and just phoned it in. It's unclear why such a lazy approach was taken, whether it may be caused by lack of talent, budget, or motivation to do their job properly. It also doesn't matter... what matters is that this has resulted in a game with zero visual appeal for gamers. It's an immediate failure on that measure alone.
Of course the "developer" was aiming at a monochrome display adapter look... except of course this doesn't resemble that or follow any of the actual graphical limitations of that platform properly... it looks inauthentic, if that's what the "developer" was trying to accomplish... another fail.
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.
Bewilderingly, the game doesn't include proper audio controls, so you can't turn off the annoying noises, you'll need to alt+tab out and stop the noise using the Windows sound mixer. This is obviously not okay and it's unclear why the developers chose not to include this basic feature.
One of the important quality checks for any video game is the audio. The bare minimum of audio controls must be there, so the experience can be tailored. The audio and music must be of high quality. Bizarrely, WireNet doesn't even have any music at all. That's an immediately failure and yet another reason to avoid this game. Most "developers" of this calibre at least go to creative commons to use someone else's audio, but the dev was too lazy for that I guess.
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 choice of using the GameMaker Studio construction kit/toolset. This is a very poor quality toolset favoured by amateur developers as it's cheap and requires little in the way of development skill, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities. 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. GameMaker Studio is most commonly used to make retro pixel shovelware and cash grabs.
A strong argument can be made that construction kits like GameMaker Studio should never be used to make games for profit, as the "developer", Xero TR-MMXZ has done here. These construction kits are intended to teach people some of the basic principles of game development, and to make small demos to pass around with friends. They're not intended to replace to actual work of real, professional game developers. So it's inappropriate when amateurs try to use these for profit, without any actual, real game development effort taking place. This doesn't result in products that have any real meaningful value for gamers.
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 3 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 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
WireNet has the preposterous 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.
