Sullen Reviews

Sullen is an unusual twist (or should I say spin) on the shoot 'em up/bullet hell genre. Ostensibility this is a weak ripoff of the arcade classic Gyruss, and features the same core paradigm, instead of moving across the bottom or side of the screen, you move around the circumference of a circle, and the obstacles and enemies appear within that circular playfield. Where it differs midly from the Gyruss game the developer is ripping off is that there's a lot more bullets to dodge as well as some other obstacles, and you can "jump" over them, lifting you inwards from the circumference momentarily. None of this makes the game better or more interesting than Gyruss. Gyruss but with slightly worse graphics is not what was needed to revive the old, dead shoot 'em up/bullet hell genre. It's not 1980 anymore. 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. 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 extremely lazy, minimalist "art", of the type you normally expect to see in low effort Flash/browser games and mobile apps. 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. 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. Sullen 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 "First of Many", for dying (something that playing this low quality "game" will inspire many to want to do), trivial to achieve, but less than 1 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 only happened once, and isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 1 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 little merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam? Sullen 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 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.