RPG Maker strikes again!
Vindictive Drive is one of hundreds of low effort retro-pixel RPG Maker asset/construction kit flips spamming the Steam catalog, made with the RPG Maker video game construction kit... in their own words, "Our easy to use tools are simple enough for a child." Like all RPG Maker "games", this is essentially a bunch of low quality/canned assets from RPG Maker coupled with a cringeworthy high school anime club fan fiction. And, unfortunately, some of the developers own "art", too. Easy, stomach.
This is basically the product of someone watching way too much Mission: Impossible and way, way, way too many "edgy" anime series like Darker than Black and Ergo Proxy so that's what they made their RPG Maker fan fiction about. The writing is terrible, of course, so it's absolutely on par with all the other RPG Maker asset flips infesting Steam (this is the 331st RPG Maker asset flip I've had the displeasure of reviewing).
Disastrously, they decided not to make this a pure RPG Maker asset flip and create some of their own art assets. Without having a single iota of the talent required to do so. Seriously, the artwork here is terrible, it's a blend of old retro pixel "art" used as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics, and some of the most amateurish MS-Paint/Baby's First Wacom Tablet style drawings I've ever hurt my eyes on.
This reveals one of the most important rules of game development... while rule #1 is never to use asset flips, rule #2 is if you can't do better than asset store assets, don't "try" anyway, because that's so much worse. Imagine how much higher the quality of all video games would be if amateur developers understood those very basic rules. There would be a lot less trash on Steam, that's for sure. Unfortunately they don't, which is why I have to keep wading through all this garbage.
As with all RPG Maker games, the poor quality engine displays badly in fullscreen and doesn't have full HD support or any graphics tweaking options, making this unacceptable for any dedicated modern PC gamer. The point can be made that the intention of RPG Maker is to make demos and small games to pass around friends, and shouldn't be used for "professional" game development.
Like most RPG Maker shovelware and asset flips, the game features extremely low quality copy + pasted 2D retro pixel art, looks awful, and has even worse gameplay. RPG Maker is an absolutely terrible construction kit, and never results in games of any reasonable quality or value to gamers.
Gamers who want a good retro JRPG experience would be better off playing the originals, like Final Fantasy, Star Ocean or Chrono Trigger.
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 appears 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.
Vindictive Drive is relatively cheap at $3 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend.
