Doubles Hard Reviews

nise

One of the best, cheap and simple games that you can buy while waiting for Cyberpunk 2077.

Doubles Hard is, when you get down to it, just an unabashed ripoff of the Commodore 64 game, Boulder Dash from, 1984. The chief difference in this Nintendo Switch game is just that it's 3D rendered and you need to use the arrow keys to change the orientation of the 3D cube (instead of the usual 2D action puzzle levels). Gameplay, however, is the same. Collect the gems, eat the dirt, move the boulders... but be careful because the boulders and gems will fall, and boulders will crush you! That's really all there is to this. Boulder Dash is abandonware that can be played for free in a web browser, and yet these guys want you to pay them cash money because they ripped off someone else's game. That's really whats wrong with the "indie" game scene these days. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. The game features lazy low-polygon "retro" assets, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the 1990s. It's unclear why the developers weren't able to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets for the game, and also irrelevant... what matters is that this looks bad as a result of their decisions, a compromise PC gamers shouldn't have to put up with. 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. To make matters worse, there's no mouse input, despite this being sold on PC as if it were a PC game. This is unacceptable and somewhat insulting to PC gamers. It's a good demonstration of the poor attitude the developer has towards PC gamers, and this attitude has resulted in yet another defect in this game. 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. 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 50,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. Doubles Hard has the insane price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. For comparison, the $5 asking price for this game could get you games like "Civilization VI", "This War of Mine" or "Rainbow 6 Siege". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this. There's also thousands of free, superior quality games on Steam.