Zhmyshenko Valery Albertovich is a joke game, slapped together with some pixel/MS-paint assets by filling out stuff in the drag and drop ClickTeam Fusion childrens toy construction kit. The game involves crap badly made platforming, and the goal of the game is to drink alcohol and shoot members of the LGBT+ community. More on the intolerant, vile nature of the Russian developer behind this later.
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 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.
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 Clickteam Fusion construction kit - the "No-Code" construction kit that "Anyone can make games with!!". Including, you know, people who aren't game developers. Which is a problem. This is a very poor quality toolset sometimes used by amateur developers as it's free (so they don't have to pay for GameMaker Studio) and doesn't require advanced game development skills, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities (it's arguably worse than GameMaker Studio). 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. 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 5 players, and the worst part is these weren't genuine players, these were the Russian fake review accounts that the developer paid to make the fake reviews. Since the fake reviews are all done, 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.
While game reviews must be about the game, as this review has been, it's sometimes important for gamers to be aware when there's problems with the developers. In this case, Nikita "Ghost_RUS", a Russian shovelware scam artist who routinely abuses Steam by polluting the marketplace with shovelware like this game. Nikita "Ghost_RUS" continually sends a message of racism, bigotry, homophobia and hate speech through his games, in direct violation of Valve's guidlines for acceptable game content. You can read more about it in [url=https://steamcommunity.com/groups/Sentinels_of_the_Store/announcements/detail/1663386372399476871]this article by the Sentinels of the Store[/url] curator group.
This is something I feel potential customers should be aware of for two reasons. First, I understand completely that gamers may not want to buy games with such horrible, antihumanitarian messages of hate such as games from Nikita "Ghost_RUS". Secondly, gamers must be aware that if Valve decides to do the right thing and enforce their policy against hate speech and bigotry in games, games such as this will be banned. So, buying games from Nikita "Ghost_RUS" may be putting your money at risk.
[b][quote][url=https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2017/01/18/steam-takes-down-art-of-stealth-after-developer-posts-fake-reviews/?sh=750e13e12354]Warning: Review Manipulation![/url][/quote][/b]This game features a number of fake positive reviews from accounts known to be in the business of review manipulation/paid reviews. They're all written in the same Russian style, appear at almost exactly the same time, exactly 3 days after the game launched on Steam, all have a direct Steam purchase of the game. The "Positive" review score on this game should be disregarded due to this blatant, unethical review manipulation. This is done to deceive and scam gamers into paying for a bad product.
[b]Note:[/b] Because this is more of a "joke" game, intended to draw attention from controversy or in the hopes of going viral because it's "so bad it's good" (but it isn't good at all), there's nothing here to offer to serious gamers. As usual, with most awful/joke games, all the comedians come out of the woodwork. The vast majority of the remaining reviews (apart from the obviously fake ones) for this game are joke reviews, such as "this game cured my cancer, saved my marriage, changed my life" etc. Because most of the reviews are as insincere as the game itself is, the positive review score for this game should be disregarded.
Zhmyshenko Valery Albertovich is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. 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.
