Zahalia

I bought this game on sale, so I didn't spend much money on it, but I am still disappointed. I looked forward to it because of its old-school look, a game mechanic like Zelda and for the easy achievements. However, I can't recommend this game at all and will elaborate on the negative parts. - The key mapping is a mess and not intuitive at all. For example: I couldn't close the options menu without closing the entire game. - Text from NPC: "Press [S] to interact with something. Press [F] to interact with something." Interact with what? At first nothing happened while [Space] could be used for interactions. Later I found out that the keys let you use health and mana potions respectively. - No key re-mapping which is annoying when you use a QWERTZ keyboard and attack is [Z] and magic is [X] by default. Ok, rather a minor point of annoyance but still annoying. - Whenever I closed the game - for some stupid reason - I always went back to the starting point and had to backtrack to the area I was in before. Turned out to be a blessing in disguise when I got enclosed in an area with a bush, had no mana left to burn it and no way to replenish it. So leaving was impossible. - During the hour I played it, I should have gotten at least 2-3 achievements (killing monsters and money) but I never got them even after closing the game. I like to hunt for achievements if a game offers them and as mentioned above: That was also a reason why I bought the game in the first place. Overall I didn't enjoy it and can't recommend it but I might get back to the game if most of the issues are fixed.

Played it for an hour and a half. One of the dungeon doors reset in the second cyrstal dungeon after I saved and quit for the night, permanently screwing over my file. My second run I found a secret passageway that just sent me back to the title screen and then made my character disappear upon starting up that file. Only fixed by completely exiting out of game, and this bug was easily replicated. Achievements don't activate, even after a supposed patch. I know it's a cheap game, but man this sure makes me leary of this developer in the future. Don't bother. Simplistic Legend of Zelda clone that couldn't pass QA. Get what you pay for I guess, not really worth anyone's time right now.

Zahalia is an extremely badly made ripoff of The Legend of Zelda (copyright Nintendo, 1986). To date, it's unclear whether Nintendo have taken any legal action against the "developer" to preserve their intellectual property rights. It's a very buggy (to the point of being unplayable) 2D retro pixel top down brawler slapped together with GameMaker Studio, so the developer chose pretty much every way one could fail at game development and ran into them headfirst. It gets worse. 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. 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. Compounding this problem, the developer didn't bother with resolutions over 720p, so the game looks like complete garbage. Despite being over 30 years newer than The Legend of Zelda, the game looks considerably worse in quality. If Miyamoto had released this in 1986 instead of The Legend of Zelda, we wouldn't know what "Nintendo" was as a brand. 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. 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. The game is incredibly buggy. Basic things just don't work. Once you enter the video settings menu for the game, for example, it's impossible to leave! You have to quit the game and restart it. Basic, simple, primitive levels of software testing simply weren't done on this trashware. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected in the general public reception. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 2 players. That's right, only 2. 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, the overwhelming lack of interest in the game is to be expected. Gamers just didn't take this low quality game seriously, and for good reason. Zahalia is relatively cheap at $2 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend.

Dont even think about buying this... Not even basic stuff is working correctly

neat zelda 1 knock off.

The game is very easy but still fun I might get the sequel. After reading the comments I'd like to mention. The game is no longer full of glitches. Use an Xbox controller as I never got the keyboard to work. I also did I find a keybindings menu.

The game is a fun Zelda clone, and the devs have recently made some fixes after a long spell off. I have switched from a negative to positive as the game is pretty fun for what it is.

Saw a Mixed overall review, decided to give it a chance anyway. Finished it in a few hours and proceeded to add it to my list of favorite games on Steam. It's not a perfect game, but it's exactly what I wanted it to be.