[i]Craftoon[/i] is a brainless clicker/incrementer... you know the type, click on stuff to make numbers go up so you can buy stuff to help you click on stuff to make numbers go up so you can buy stuff to... you get the idea. The brainless gameplay is, unsurprisingly, accompanied with an equally low quality technical implementation and poor presentation, resulting in yet another horribly low quality shovelware game that might as well have been done in a web browser.
Pixelabor keeps spamming this same game onto Steam (20+ times now)... restructured and reskinned, but each iteration is basically the same incrementer idler format. I mean... it makes sense, if only 2-3 people buy your game, and you're not capable of making games anyone would want, well, don't try, just copy + paste your game out 20 more times and get 20 more sales. Why is spamming Steam with garbage good for gamers? Who knows, but shovelware pushers will do anything for a few bucks, apparently. If you don't believe me, well, "Craftoon" proves that resoundingly.
The game is very simplistic, small and limited in scope and ambition. This feels more like a tech demo, proof of concept or student homework assignment rather than a fully fledged product designed for PC gamers. As such it doesn't offer any real value as a serious PC game.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The visuals in this game are a complete joke, it's seriously just a bunch of MS-Paint sprites/images that look like they were lazily scrawled out over the space of a couple of hours. Like, with the mouse, it doesn't look like they even used a Wacom tablet or anything. It's so bad even pixel "art" would look better than this. Pure MSPaint. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget to arrange someone who can create graphical assets properly, or lack of talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low, enough on its own to deter gamers.
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.
Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the GameMaker Studio construction kit/toolset. This is a very poor quality toolset favoured by amateur developers as it's cheap and requires little in the way of development skill, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities. 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. GameMaker Studio is most commonly used to make retro pixel shovelware and cash grabs.
A strong argument can be made that construction kits like GameMaker Studio should never be used to make games for profit, as the "developer", Pixelabor has done here. These construction kits are intended to teach people some of the basic principles of game development, and to make small demos to pass around with friends. They're not intended to replace to actual work of real, professional game developers. 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.
Those technical issues put this game beneath what is expected from a contemporary, professionally developed PC game.
The poor quality of this game is also reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was [b]only 2 players[/b]. This is a remarkably low number, and 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 130 million gamers on Steam and well over 140,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
Let's look at the price and what kind of value this actually offers gamers. Should you buy this game? Is it one of the best of the 140,000+ games on Steam?
Craftoon is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. This is also competing with over 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
The quality problems and defects with this game makes the asking price totally unrealistic. It's impossible to recommend this to gamers here on Steam.
[quote][b][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/b]
Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.[/quote]
[quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Response![/url][/quote]The developer has weighed in to inform everyone they didn't read the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Usage Rules[/url] for Steam "partners", or they deliberately ignored the part where Valve says:
[quote]Though it may be tempting, not every review needs to be responded to. A developer response will frequently draw more attention than the original statement, potentially turning a small issue into a much larger community discussion. It's also not a good idea to use this feature to refute customer opinions. Your direct attention can be seen as validation or a defensive attempt to silence your customers.[/quote]
The "developer" argues that I review a lot of games, therefore this game review isn't valid or truthful. Huh. If I changed all my other reviews to positive, would the graphics and gameplay of this crap game suddenly improve? No. The developer seeks any possible angle to throw shade at me personally to discredit my review. You can see what they are trying to do. If this was the only review I have ever written, would that change any of the properties of this game or alter the facts contained in my review? Of course not. [b]My reviews for other games have no bearing on the dismal quality of this failed product[/b].
The developer makes the libelous suggestion that I get paid for reviews... this is highly informative about the mental state of this Brazilian crapware pusher. Did you know that Brazil is a close runner up behind Russia and China as being responsible for the vast amount of sheer crap and fake game BS that's flooding and infesting Steam? The developer behind this garbage... and their insulting, arrogant breach of Valve guidelines shows us why.
The developer cannot understand why anyone would advocate for gamers without being paid to do so... in fact, it's obvious from the sheer amount of crap this guy pumps onto Steam that he's never considered what's good for gamers at all.. he sees Steam as a way to scam gamers out of some Real for complete garbage. At no point did this developer consider making a game that gamers would want, [b]and that was never the point.[/b]
This attitude from crapware pushers that this developer exhibits here is a disgusting insult to gamers and the gaming industry.
Nothing in the developers pointless breach of Valve guidelines changes any of the objective facts of my review. My review stands unaltered. I cannot recommend this crap to anyone.
