Battle Simulator: Counter Stickman Reviews

yes

[b][quote][b][URL=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyware]Spyware Warning![/URL][/b]This game acts as spyware and performs personal data gathering and transmission. There's no immediate apparent way to opt out. This is completely unethical and reprehensible. Gamers must be aware of the dangers of installing this harmful software and should avoid this completely.[/quote][/b] Lucky me gets to be the first to warn gamers about Battle Simulator: Counter Stickman, which is spyware with an asset flip wrapped around it. It's a copy + paste of a basic soldier attack/defense game with stolen low poly stick figure assets and a bunch of non-commercial sound effects slapped onto a commercial product in direct violation of the license agreement. As if this being spyware wasn't enough, it's also copyright infringement. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. 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. The game features lazy minimalist/untextured low-polygon "retro" assets and visuals, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the early 1990s. The lack of textures is a method that lazy devs often use to disguise their lack of talent/interest in doing the graphics properly and trying to disguise it under the name of "art", or "We made it look bad on purpose", which really isn't something gamers should have to put up with. It's unclear why the developers weren't willing to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets and high resolution textures for the game. It looks bad as a result of their decisions, and that's just another reason to avoid it. The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just point and click stuff like a browser/Flash game. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here. 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 game all-time peak player count was only ONE player. That's right, only one person ever played this at a time. When I played this for the purposes of reviewing it, I equalled the peak player count for the game. OUCH. 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. The game contains stock/store assets/libraries/packages, but the "developer" here hasn't credited the people who actually did the work for the game. In some cases this breaches the license agreement the developer signed for the use of those assets. Worse, some of the assets are licensed under a [b]NON-COMMERCIAL AGREEMENT[/b], but the developer is violating those licenses [b]FOR PROFIT[/b]. This is not just a contractual/license breach, in many jurisdictions this is a breach of criminal law. Claiming credit for the work of others as well as breaching software licenses and breaking the law is highly unethical. As mentioned, this game behaves as spyware and collects "telemetry" and personally identifying information. There is no apparent way to prevent this hostile and sinister privacy invasion. The developers will make the unverifiable claim that this data isn't personally identifying, of course that's BS as they're collecting IPs and all kinds of other information about gamers, when combined with other profiling data this can 100% identify an individual. They say it's for "QA" purposes but there's no guarantee they're not profiling you or selling your data to third parties as they spy on you. Should you trust them? Of course not... if they had any concerns about user safety and privacy, [i]they wouldn't have built spyware into their game with no way to disable it![/i] There's simply no reason to trust them and gamers should avoid this game because of this unacceptable privacy invasion. Battle Simulator: Counter Stickman 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, and the questionable ethical nature of the developer and/or their associates (as outlined above), this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 9,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.