Run The Gamut Reviews

Run The Gamut is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. The graphics are terrible. It's just untextured, basic pixel blocks and blobs, and a few simple vector shapes. It's clear the developer didn't even try to produce any real graphics for the game and just phoned it in. It's unclear why such a lazy approach was taken, whether it may be caused by lack of talent, budget, or motivation to do their job properly. It also doesn't matter... what matters is that this has resulted in a game with zero visual appeal for gamers. It's an immediate failure on that measure alone. 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 controls and game handling are notably very clunky and unsmooth here. It's janky and unsatisfying to play... and any experienced gamer will tell you, the handling, responsiveness and general gameplay feel of the control scheme must be well polished for this kind of game to succeed. Unfortunately, this is something the developer seems to have phoned in, with little to no apparent gameplay testing. They dropped the ball on this one. Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the video game library/engine, OpenFL Framework. It's rarely used, because it's arguably worse than construction kits like GameMaker Studio, RPGMaker and Clickteam Fusion, but it's also much harder to work with. Despite this, OpenFL Framework has very limited capabilities, which go some way to explaining the poor quality of the game. 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. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. Run The Gamut didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the game, either. It has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game didn't really capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for finishing the first simple tutorial level, this takes 10 seconds, trivial to get, but less than 11 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. Hardly a success story, gamers just weren't all that interested in the game. Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a modest spike in player counts for the game. But this isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 11 percent of players bothered playing the game for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this game to have so many concurrent players who didn't bother engaging with this game? Trading cards. People will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game. That tells us people only really bought this game for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards. Run The Gamut is relatively cheap at $1 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.

I'm gonna make up my own story here because so far the game doesn't actually seem to have one: You are a little devil and you are trying to escape from hell. You have unlimited lives, but the penalty for death is that you are still stuck down here in hell. I have no idea if there is any kind of ending; I'm not even close to making progress towards it. I'm about 8 levels in and ready to cry. --- So… as for a review: Look very closely at the screenshots and videos for the game on the store page. If you don't like what you see, don't buy the game; because what you see is what you get. At it's core Run the Gamut is a simple old school platformer that reminds me of nostalgic pixel platformers from the 80's and early 90's but with cell shading and shinier colors. Beyond that, Run the Gamut is hardcore. The difficulty is relentless and it doesn't let up. Each level is a screen wide puzzle that you must jump through to reach the exit. All while avoiding fire and spikes. The controls are unforgiving, the deaths come fast and furious and if you can't maintain your calm you will just die even faster on the next attempt. This is a game intentionally designed to test your patience as much as your gaming skills. The puzzles start out appearing deceptively easy but that doesn't last long and the slightest mistake is instant death. Oh, and you're on a timer so don't stand there thinking about your next jump: move or die because you probably have about 7 seconds to live. And just to spice things up, there's random events like Earthquakes to make hard levels randomly harder, because this game only exists to drive you nuts. I only played for a few minutes before I needed a break. Functionally the music is good, the sound effects are passable and the controls can be configured/key mapped. (its keyboard or gamepad ~ no mouse needed for gameplay, only for menu selections) Controls are not complex: left, right, jump, run, slide There's not much else to say. It's a pretty simple game concept. You're a little devil, better run for that door or die. --- Bottom line: It's fun. Assuming you like old school platformers and crazy hard difficulty levels. --- [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/38232109/]While you are here, would you consider following my curator page?[/url] [url=https://steamcommunity.com/id/kunovega/recommended/]Want to read all of my reviews and not just the curated ones?[/url]