Zerowood

Lucky me gets the dubious honour of writing the first review for Zerowood. Zerowood is a very poorly made arcade/endless runner with a UFO invasion theme. Gameplay consists of riding a bike endlessly to the left, avoiding or jumping on cars, avoiding trucks etc while the UFOs fly overhead and cause more problems. Overall, a very shallow gaming experience that makes mobile apps like Angry Birds look deep and sophisticated. Valve says we're supposed to write something we "like" about games when we write a review, so... uh... this is sincerely made and doesn't seem to be an asset flip. That's unfortunately where the good stuff runs out. There's only partial English translation for the game, many elements of the UI aren't in English, but that's ok. It turns out, the language of bad games is universal. 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 no options to change the resolution for the game or customise the graphics settings. There's no way for gamers to ensure this is running at the native resolution of their displays... there's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. There's no way for gamers to try improve the low quality graphics. Bewilderingly, the game doesn't include proper audio controls, so you can't turn off the annoying background music, you'll need to alt+tab out and stop the music using the Windows sound mixer. This is obviously not okay and it's unclear why the developers chose not to include this basic feature. 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. PC gamers will be insulted by the presence of console peasant children's toy controller prompts, despite this being on PC. Developers should try to be aware which platform they're developing for. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. Zerowood has an overly optimistic price of around $4 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.