Concursion

Game opens to title screen. Shows dialog about plugging in a controller, which I have plugged in. On the title screen, nothing happens. Nothing on the controller changes the menu. Nothing on the keyboard I could find changes the menu. There's no mouse cursor. I quit the game (using alt-F4, as you can't quit normally) and tried it without the controller plugged-in. No change. In fact the only control that kind of worked, and I found this by accident by spazzing out on the Xbox controller trying to get the game running, is if you hit the Xbox logo key the screen kind of dims and gets bright a couple times. That's it. Not sure if it's incompatible with Windows 10 or what, but. Game simply does not work on my PC.

[quote][b]Warning: Broken Game![/b] This game has design/implementation defects that will render this unplayable for many gamers. The game is bugged in such a way that no keyboard or controller inputs work. The game menu doesn't work, it's impossible to start a game.[/quote] Concursion is an older game from 2014. It's a venerable 11 years old at the time of this review. It's unclear when the game stopped working. The idea with this broken game is that you play through a few different lightweight ripoffs of other game genres, from platforming, shoot 'em up and so on... but the game doesn't work, so that's that. On technical quality, it's somewhat academic and I can only advise based on available media, because the game itself cannot be played. The game features simple, cartoony 2D graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort mobile apps. 3D graphics programming does require a degree of skill and competence and unfortunately not all developers have the budget or talent to deliver this, despite 3D graphics cards hitting the mainstream in the 1990's. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing. This looks and feels like a mobile app, but I wasn't able to find it on the app stores. Maybe it was removed, maybe it was rejected by Apple and Google (they do have more rigorous quality standards than Valve does for Steam, after all). Regardless, for all intents and purposes Concursion might as well be a mobile app, it has the same limitations and dumbed down qualities. It's impossible to recommend such a game to PC gamers. We don't spend all this money building gaming rigs so we can pretend they're iPhones and play games that might as well be mobile apps. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. You don't have to take my word about how bad the game is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. Concursion has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is "Stop and Smell the Roses", for collecting four gem shards in one level, trivial to achieve, but less than 9 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch. Unethically, the developers have left this on the Steam store in an unplayable and broken state. It's the responsibility of the developer to maintain their product, ensure it runs on all modern PCs, or if they determine there's defects and the game doesn't work, they should remove it from sale instead of misleadingly trying to scam gamers into buying knowingly defective products. This is harmful to Steam and to gamers, not just because it's a direct and intentional attempt to scam people, but because it takes a share of the marketing space and visibility away from other games. It's polluting Steam and making it harder for gamers to find genuine games and for genuine indie developers who put months or years into making proper games find an audience. So, should you buy this broken game? Is this one of the best of the 110,000+ games on Steam? The developer is deliberately and unethically trying to scam gamers into paying them the almost unethical price of $5 USD for a game they know is broken. Don't give it to them.