Neon Knight: Vengeance From The Grave

Игра «Neon Knight: Vengeance From The Grave» сочетает динамичный геймплей с яркой атмосферой. Бой с роботами и мрачный сюжет о мести создают напряжение. Графика с яркими цветами и детализацией подчеркивает стиль, а звуки добавляют погружения. Управление отзывчивое, но сложность повышается резко. Несмотря на краткий сюжет, игра заставляет возвращаться за новыми достижениями. Рекомендую тем, кто любит экшн с элементами приключений.

Thousands of retro 2D platformers are infesting Steam, and "Neon Knight: Vengeance From The Grave" is just more pollution in a crowded market of terrible games. There are over 17,000 platformers on Steam, literally thousands (you can go see for yourself if you search for the platformer tag on the store, I'm not kidding). And this is far from being one of the best of those. This is a laughably awful action platformer from Eastern Europe, basically you're a warrior risen from the dead and you fight stuff in the underworld. Which involves some of the worst platforming I've seen in days. Combat is the focus over platforming, which you might think is a good thing but the combat is worse than the platforming. The platforming genre is pretty much obsolete... just a tiny number of professionally developed platformers exist on PC and offer any real value or interest to gamers (Silksong, etc). This is nowhere near being as good as Hollow Knight or Silksong. Even without a price tag, it's easy to see why gamers ignored this in favor of modern, professionally developed 3D games. This is offering nothing new or interesting, so it's easy to see why this failed. This is another case of Itch failing the one single job it has... to protect and preserve the gaming industry from badly made amateur games, by creating a containment zone to isolate amateur drivel, reinforced with endless participation trophies and high-5's every time an amateur dev manages to get their build to compile. Regrettably, in this instance, amateur drivel leaked out onto Steam and now we have to put up with it. It feels like a relic from the late 1990's/early 2000's Adobe Flash era of a gaming. But this has been published on Steam alongside contemporary, cutting edge PC games. I didn't build a gaming rig just to use it to play glorified browser/Flash games, and neither did every other dedicated PC enthusiast out there. Steam isn't here to compete with Chrome and Firefox. The game features really lacklustre 2D visuals (does the developer not know 3D graphics became mainstream in the mid-1990s?). Gamers don't spend thousands of dollars on gaming rigs and the latest 3D graphics cards to play 2D games. Even mobile phones and game consoles can do 3D graphics now. There's no excuse. This game is fairly dated at 8 years old... and even back then it looked old and busted compared to contemporary, professionally made 3D games of the same period. It looked bad then, it looks worse now. This was made with the godawful "GameMaker Studio" construction kit/toolset, which is popular amongst amateur developers because it handholds you through making really crap 2D games that you can publish for $100 on Steam Direct. This lets you pat yourself on the back for pretending to be a real game developer, which explains why GameMaker Studio is responsible for so much ignored garbage on Steam. GameMaker Studio has never really been used to make a truly successful game, but that doesn't stop people from trying and failing. It's a particularly bad game engine that can only be used for making low quality 2D products. Like this. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, as the old saying goes. Another reason this particular game wasn't successful. Now onto pricing and value. There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $14 USD for this. Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It seems like a nice gesture for the game to have no up-front cost anymore, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product. This is also a bit of a slap in the face to anyone who showed enough questionable judgement to pay money for this... nobody got refunded. Even as a free game, this couldn't find an audience. With a peak of [b]only 5 players[/b], it's clear the Steam community took one look and walked away. They literally couldn't pay people to spend time playing this. Bearing in mind that free games don't add +1 to your game collector count, should you bother adding this to your library and downloading it? What's the verdict? Give this one a miss. Although it's free, your time and storage are valuable resources, and the market is filled with superior options.