peakvox Escape Virus HD Reviews

"peakvox Escape Virus HD" is a very lazy, badly done console port for Escape Virus, a Japanese Nintendo Wii game, that seriously doesn't belong on Steam, especially in this shoddy state. Gameplay is basic top down stuff, there's a couple of modes like a shooter mode and a "Snake/Tron" ripoff mode, giving this less depth than your average mobile app, but here we are with a failed Nintendo Wii game, on Steam, which is for PC games. Sigh. 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 simple, cartoony 2D graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort mobile apps. 3D graphics programming does require a degree of skill and competence and unfortunately not all developers have the budget or talent to deliver this, despite 3D graphics cards hitting the mainstream in the 1990's. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing. The implementation here is of such poor quality, the developer couldn't work out how to make the game display in fullscreen, it only runs in a window. Bewilderingly, the game doesn't include proper audio controls, so you can't turn off the annoying background music, you'll need to alt+tab out and stop the music using the Windows sound mixer. This is obviously not okay and it's unclear why the developers chose not to include this basic feature. The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts. Because this is designed for consoles, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the inferior console gaming appliances that the game was designed for. These are unfortunate compromises and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was a second thought for the console-centric developers. The game is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for consoles forces upon a game. Once more, console peasants have made gaming worse for everyone. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. You don't have to take my word about how bad the game is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. "peakvox Escape Virus HD" has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for starting the game, trivial to achieve, but less than 3 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch. Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the game. But this isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 3 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. "peakvox Escape Virus HD" has the far too high price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam.

I feel like the game is, even at a refund, too expensive. The game is not horrible but 7$? I feel a price of 2-3.50 would be more fair. Like I said the game is not horrible but at current price I don't recommend it...