Chaos Domain

Chaos Domain is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. This one might be deceptive because it has pretty okay looking 3D rendering for the 2D gameplay (retro pixel amateurs, once more take note), but while decent graphics are a must for any game to be successful, that's just a minimum requirement. This is an arcade like platformer shooter with a kind of sci-fi egyptian theme (yet still less cool than Stargate). The rest of the game here is garbage, with terrible hit detection, unpleasant floaty control handling... it's just an unpolished mess that obviously was never playtested before it was published. It's also extremely buggy, with almost everyone who tried playing it experiencing crashes and other unplayable, game breaking bugs. That's just not okay for such terrible worksmanship to be published here on Steam, it's not good for gamers. On the upside, the game does feature customisable controls and resolution, so at least some of the basic, minimum requirements have been met. Unfortunately there's a number of other technical defects and shortcomings which contribute to the game being difficult to recommend to gamers. The developers didn't design the game for modern gaming PCs, as such the display resolution caps out at 1080p, a very low resolution that became mainstream back in 2006 and became obsolete when 4K entered the mainstream in 2014. The game simply won't look right on modern gaming displays due to this failure on the part of the developers. While this is on PC, it has all the hallmarks and deficiencies of a console game, from the clunkier than needed control scheme to the less than cutting edge graphics. There's 10's of thousands of PC games on Steam, and PC gamers deserve only the best. This might not appeal to many gamers due to the lack of PC-centric design. It's unclear why this game was never accepted on the video game console appliances it seems to have been designed for. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The game never really caught on with the millions of gamers on Steam, with a very low peak player count close to launch, and then just a handful of players launching this game every couple of days. This is undoubtedly caused by factors such as those raised in this review. It's always helpful with buying decisions to consider how popular and successful the product is, and unfortunately while this did accumulate a few participation trophy reviews, overall, people just aren't using it. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam? Chaos Domain is relatively cheap at $3 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. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.