Panic Pump - Can you save them ALL? Reviews

no

Weird presentation, but the puzzles and rotation based levels are cleverly designed. If you like time based 3D puzzle games, this is definitely worth the price of admission. GG!

"Panic Pump - Can you save them ALL?" is what looks like something intended to be a mobile app that found its way to Steam instead. It's a little difficult to describe the gameplay, but I'll try. For those familiar with the safecracking boardgame, "Downfall", you'll be familiar with the idea there's various dials with notches that hold the little tokens... it's a bit like that. You're presented with a cube. Each face of the cube has a series of pipes and rotators. Each rotator has a number of notches. Balls are released into the pipe system on a metered basis. To complete each puzzle level, you must fill each rotator/dial with a ball. Obviously filling up the first in the series of rotators won't fill the following ones, so the game is a bit like a platespinner as you quickly take each ball, push it down the pipes, match the colours of the balls in each rotator, and finally do all this properly before the time runs out. Whew! So you can see from that convoluted explanation that this is a little convoluted as far as puzzles go... and puzzle games really shouldn't have such steep learning curves. Now you couple this with the frustrating time limits, making this more of an action puzzle than a thinking puzzle, and the mobile app style delivery (there's even cosmetics and so on... perhaps angling towards an intention to later include mobile app style MTX into the game?) and you can kind of see why this flopped on Steam (player count data below, as always). One important note is that even though this is an amateur project, it does seem to be sincerely and genuinely made. I couldn't find any flipped assets, plagiarism or any other kind of insincere actions from the developer, but unfortunately genuine intentions alone are not enough to produce a brilliant PC gaming experience. This game has been translated from some other language into English... badly. If this was done through Google Translate, Google Translate should feel ashamed of itself. Regardless, the language in this game is broken and will put off a lot of gamers. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. The game assets are far from bleeding edge, with lowish polygon counts and somewhat low resolution textures, making this look like it's at least 10 years old. 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 poor in comparison to more professionally produced games as a result of their decisions. The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just iPhone screen tapping stuff. 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. This looks and feels like a mobile app, but it doesn't seem to have made it to the app stores. It's unclear why this was put on Steam instead of the app stores it seems to have been designed for. Maybe it was removed, maybe it was rejected by Apple and Google (they do have more rigorous quality standards than Valve does for Steam, after all). Regardless, for all intents and purposes "Panic Pump - Can you save them ALL?" might as well be a mobile app, it has the same limitations and dumbed down qualities. It's impossible to recommend such a game to PC gamers. We don't spend all this money building gaming rigs so we can pretend they're iPhones and play games that might as well be mobile apps. 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 4 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. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best? "Panic Pump - Can you save them ALL?" 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. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.

Randomly picked this up for $0.49. Actually has some surprisingly engaging puzzles.