Strikey Sisters is a 9 year old Nintendo Switch game that's been put on Steam as a bit of a cash grab (wait until you see the price on this 10 year old pixelcrap). Now, in fairness, if they had published this game in 1992 it would probably have been a top seller. It is not 1992. I do not understand why the developers, in 2017, looking at games like Resident Evil 7 and thought, yeah, 3D graphics haven't been invented yet so we have to use pixelcrap. Beggars belief. Anyway, that was their business model.
Oh yeah, what is the game? Well, it's not the worst mashup I've seen but it doesn't hold long term interest... this is a hybrid brickbreaker/Pong/Breakout ripoff but with top down shooter/boss fight mechanics slapped onto it. You start out whacking the Pong ball around the place to break blocks, but you also need to dodge incoming fire and try to get the ball to hit the spawning enemies. Overall I found it frustrating to play, and the sheer lack of quality (this is a Nintendo Switch game after all, and if I wanted to play Nintendo Switch games I wouldn't have built a gaming PC) really kills the experience.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
Because this is designed for handheld/portable gaming appliances, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the low power handheld gaming appliances that the game was designed for. These are unfortunate compromises and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was a second thought for the mobile game developers. The game is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for low power handhelds forces upon a game. While this might run well on a Steam Deck, we must remember the vast majority of gamers here are gaming on PC.
This game fails on the visuals because of the use of incredibly lazy, ugly pixelcrap. The developer would probably argue this is a "deliberate artistic choice" but we all know it's because the developer was incapable of producing anything better. The game looks very poor compared to professionally developed games. Whether the developer lacked the skill or the budget for modern visuals is irrelevant, this looks bad because of that developer decision. Gaming is a visual medium, and it's a disservice to gamers when developers don't bother doing their jobs and creating contemporary, high quality visuals. Games like Undertale and Stardew Valley are rare exceptions that succeeded [i]in spite[/i] of their awful graphics. Pixelcrap is never really okay, and there's no excuse for games that look this bad.
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", DYA Games 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.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The achievements paint an unflattering picture of how the game landed with players. The most attainable achievement is "Lovely Gals", beating a level with three "hearts", yet only 40 percent of players picked it up. Most people who own this apparently had no interest in playing it for any real length of time.
Let's talk about pricing and the actual value this has for gamers. Is this game one of the best of the 140,000+ games on Steam?
Strikey Sisters has the pathetically optimistic price of $10 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games.
For comparison, the $10 asking price for this game could get you games like "Metro Exodus", "The Elder Scrolls Online" or "Stellaris". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this. No pixelcrap is worth $10. If developers want to get paid the same kind of money as real game developers who know how to do graphics properly, they need to learn how to do graphics properly.
Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend.
