StopTime Drive Reviews

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StopTime Drive is an unusual puzzle game with a racing theme (although this is not actually a racing game, so don't let appearances deceive). So what's it all about? It's a pathing puzzle game where you make a continuous series of choices... move left+forward, right+forward, or just forward. This moves you step by step along a "roadway" full of obstacles (that don't move, unlike, you know, cars, which do, hence this not being anything like racing). You must move in such a way that you won't collide with any of the obstacles, and considering you must move forwards, this can create quite a challenge. There's also pickups to aim for, and you may need to become familiar with the levels to put yourself on the right path to collect them. You also consume fuel with every move, so you need to sometimes collect a fuel pickup, another challenge for your forwards-only moving schema. So it's a unique concept, and it might even be fun if it was delivered in a way gamers might actually like. And on a platform people might actually look for this kind of game on, like, you know, iPhones. This really doesn't feel like a PC game at all. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result. There's no options to change the resolution for the game or customise the graphics settings. There's no way for gamers to ensure this is running at the native resolution of their displays... there's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. There's no way for gamers to try improve the low quality graphics. 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. Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the GameMaker Studio construction kit/toolset. This is a very poor quality toolset favoured by amateur developers as it's cheap and requires little in the way of development skill, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities. 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. GameMaker Studio is most commonly used to make retro pixel shovelware and cash grabs. A strong argument can be made that construction kits like GameMaker Studio should never be used to make games for profit, as the "developer", vaniloput games has done here. These construction kits are intended to teach people some of the basic principles of game development, and to make small demos to pass around with friends. They're not intended to replace to actual work of real, professional game developers. So it's inappropriate when amateurs try to use these for profit, without any actual, real game development effort taking place. This doesn't result in products that have any real meaningful value for gamers. 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 2 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 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. StopTime Drive is relatively cheap at $2 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. The game might do better if reskinned with contemporary artwork and published on mobile app stores where it would find a more suitable audience.