Gunlok Reviews

[quote][b]Warning: Broken Game![/b] This game has design/implementation defects that will render this unplayable for many gamers. The developers pulled the plug on the back end servers making the game local player only. It cannot be played as originally intended. Furthermore, the game does not work on high resolution display and crashes immediately. The game cannot be played on modern gaming systems.[/quote] Gunlok is an ancient game from 2000. It's a whopping 24 years old at the time of this review. The game lacks support for any modern gaming display resolutions (or widescreen monitors), hasn't been modernised or updated to run smoothly on modern gaming PCs. Despite this lack of modernisation, it carries a pretty high price tag for such an ancient game. This seems to have been put on Steam as a nostalgia gouge, or just a cash grab to try profit from abandonware. Gunlock was a hybrid top down combat game and adventure/RPG of medium quality... the kind of thing that went straight into the bargain bins at the front of the store to be walked straight by. Remember in the same year as this we got Deus Ex, Diablo 2 and X-Com: Apocalypse. This wasn't even a blip in comparison. If you can get it to work, the game only displays in 4:3 (stretched) aspect ratio, due to the age of the game, it predates the 16:9 widescreen gaming standard established back in 2006. It's possible they're marketing this towards people using an old CRT they found in a dumpster, or this game is being specifically marketed towards people gaming on PC's from 1995... either way, this isn't really acceptable in the modern era of PC gaming. It's obviously not going to look right on a modern 16:9 gaming display. 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 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. Unethically, the developers have left this on the Steam store in an unplayable and broken state. It's the responsibility of the developer to maintain their product, ensure it runs on all modern PCs, or if they determine there's defects and the game doesn't work, they should remove it from sale instead of misleadingly trying to scam gamers into buying knowingly defective products. This is harmful to Steam and to gamers, not just because it's a direct and intentional attempt to scam people, but because it takes a share of the marketing space and visibility away from other games. It's polluting Steam and making it harder for gamers to find genuine games and for genuine indie developers who put months or years into making proper games find an audience. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam? The developer is deliberately and unethically trying to scam gamers into paying them the laughable price of $5 USD for a game they know is broken. Don't give it to them. This is also competing with over 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.