CortexGear: AngryDroids is a 3D rendered 2D retro platformer, but it's also got a significant distinction. I've reviewed over 10,000 games on Steam, most of them quite bad. I've seen some truly awful games, too, and of those, this is truly one of the worst games to ever plague Steam and worsen gaming simply by existing. It is possible this was made badly on purpose, but I think, perhaps more disturbingly, that this was some kind of genuine attempt to make a game. Someone out there thought it would be acceptable to publish something like this. May god have mercy on our souls.
To describe the game, probably the impression I got from the artwork, video and audio is that this simulates what it would be like to have severe mental illness and also being on a bad acid trip at the same time. And, of course, the gameplay itself is no better, it's a szhizophrenic mess trying to be a kind of twin stick shooter/platformer hybrid. I don't know if the assets are stock assets here, but they are uncredited.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The game assets are far from bleeding edge, with lowish polygon counts and somewhat low resolution textures, making this look like it's at least 10 years old. It's unclear why the developers weren't able to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets for the game, and also irrelevant... what matters is that this looks poor in comparison to more professionally produced games as a result of their decisions.
The implementation here is of such poor quality, the developer couldn't work out how to make the game display in fullscreen, it only runs in a window. But, much more startling, the game resolution is only available in 2:1 aspect ratios, capping out at 1920x960p. NOBODY owns a gaming monitor that's 2:1 resolution. NOBODY. Again, we are posed with the perplexing question... did the developer do this on purpose, choose resolutions that nobody ever uses? Or did they genuinely not understand that almost everyone is gaming on 16:9 aspect ratio displays since 2006? Either answer is simply disturbing.
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, or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, around the same time that trading cards were applied to the game... so this is just card idlers getting their cards and moving on. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.
You're forced to sign a highly questionable yet legally unenforceable End User License Agreement... for such a relatively low effort, low quality game this comes across more as a delusion of grandeur than anything else. This agreement includes questionable requirements that may attempt to revoke consumer law protections that gamers expect to have, which is also highly problematic. Developers must learn they are here to serve gamers, not control them. I had my cat walk over the keyboard while the EULA was displaying, which fixed that problem for me.
CortexGear: AngryDroids has the cash grab price of $6 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. For comparison, the $6 asking price for this game could get you games like "The Forest", "Mass Effect 3" or "Rainbow 6 Siege". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this. There's also thousands of free, superior quality games on Steam.
