Note: This game doesn't work out of the box and is unmaintained. I was only able to get it to run by browsing the game install files and launching the exe from Windows Explorer. It's unacceptable when developers push broken/unmaintained software on Steam.
KOBOLOK is your usual Eastern Bloc first person horror jumpscare adventure game, only somehow even worse than all the purely asset flipped ones, with worse graphics, worse gameplay, and more bugs than game. Wander around various awfully rendered and awfully presented locations to avoid a bread themed monster. Yeah, me neither.
I'm not really sure if KOBOLOK is an asset flip. Some elements of this game certainly make it seem like the developer put some effort into assembling some kind of original here. On the other hand, a lot of the game assets don't seem like they were created by the developer, but they haven't credited any asset creators for supplying assets, which might be a case of plagiarism. There's no evidence, so we need to give the benefit of the doubt... regardless, asset flip or not, the quality here is indistinguishable from many asset flip/cash grab scams, and that's a problem in itself.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
There's an ugly screen filter meant to make the game look even more obsolete... like the game looks bad enough already, but they actually went out of their way to make it look worse. There's no way to turn this off.
The game assets are fairly mediocre/low quality, in some places they appear mismatched... Ultimately the quality of these assets, and thus the overall visual quality is lower than average, and low quality always makes for a less than optimal gaming experience. Remember, we're looking for the best of the best of 130,000+ games on Steam.
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, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
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 3 players. 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 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 130,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 130,000+ games on Steam?
KOBOLOK has the almost scam-like price of $10 USD (is this delusion?), 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 $10 asking price for this game could get you games like "Subnautica", "Final Fantasy XIV Online" or "Ghostrunner". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.
[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]
