GunSpectre Reviews

GunSpectre is a mobile app that's been dumped on Steam as if it was a real PC game (it's not)... it's a cash grab from greedy mobile devs. This mobile app is yet another of literally hundreds of lazy amateur 2D retro top-down shooter/brawlers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. Now there's a lot of problems with this "game" which I'm about to get into, to explain why you shouldn't bother buying this, but first I just think it's remarkable that Clickteam themselves had the audacity to put their name on one of their garbage products... see, Clickteam have, perhaps indirectly or unintentionally, contributed to a great deal of harm to the gaming industry, and not just because their point and click game construction kit, Clickteam Fusion, is really, really bad, almost as bad as RPG Maker. No, the reason they cause harm is because Clickteam Fusion is one of the primary tools used by Russian asset flip scammers with fake games and fake reviews to pollute the Steam store, scamming gamers and giving indie devs a bad name. Now, I know, McDonalds aren't responsible for making people fat, but they sure facilitate it, and the same is true for Clickteam. I love gaming and I'm an avid supporter of the industry (despite there being so many poor quality games out there). So I think gamers should be aware of products like this and the nature of the developers behind them. And with that backdrop, we can perhaps understand more closely why this mobile app, GunSpectre, has come from a bad place and is most certainly a bad game you should not buy. Here's some other reasons (although I think the fact this is a mobile app really should be enough)! From a technical perspective, as a mobile app, this doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result. 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. 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 mobile app. Because this is a mobile app, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the iPhones that the mobile app was designed for. These are unfortunate handicaps and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was an afterthought for the iPhone developers who are to blame for this. The mobile app is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for mobile phones forces upon a game. Once more, mobile devs have made gaming worse for everyone. I didn't spend thousands on building a gaming rig just so I could pretend it's an iPhone. Some of the defects in the mobile app can be attributed to the choice of using the Clickteam Fusion construction kit - the "No-Code" construction kit that "Anyone can make games with!!". Including, you know, people who aren't game developers. Which is a problem. This is a very poor quality toolset sometimes used by amateur developers as it's free (so they don't have to pay for GameMaker Studio) and doesn't require advanced game development skills, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities (it's arguably worse than GameMaker Studio). 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. 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 mobile app below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. So, should you buy this mobile app? Is this one of the best of the 110,000+ games on Steam? GunSpectre is relatively cheap at $3 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the mobile app, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.