Bohnanza The Duel Reviews

[quote][b]Warning: Dead PVP Game[/b] This game has no meaningful single player content beyond botmatches, and no playable PvP servers. There is no functioning PvP population, it's a dead game, and cannot be played as intended.[/quote] Bohnanza The Duel is a digital version of the tabletop card game, Bohnanza, only with even less players than there are people in your house. Yes, even if you're the only person in your house. The idea of this card duelling game is that you are a bean farmer and you grow and harvest beans, and try to do this better than your opponent. There's a cartoony theme. When you consider people can play games like Hearthstone and MTG: Arena for free, it's no wonder nobody was interested in this. The focus of this game is pure PvP, there's no single player content (it's just a card duelling game after all). Maybe they could have added some kind of campaign or story challenge, but they didn't, expecting somehow that other gamers would be an okay substitute for content. And this "method" developers use to avoid creating game content almost always fails. Just like it did here. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals. The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just point and click stuff like a browser/Flash game. 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. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The developers made the fatal, lazy mistake of believing that PvP, other players, would be an acceptable substitute for doing the difficult job of adding single player level design, storytelling, NPCs and other rich aspects of designed game content to the game. As a result of this choice by the developers, the game has little to no actual interactive game content. It's a little considered fact that the vast majority of PvP only, multiplayer only games [b]fail[/b]. Developers must learn that other players are not an acceptable substitute for doing the job of game developers and building a game filled with content. PvP only games must have a [b]huge[/b] player base for them to "go viral" and succeed. But with no single player experience to add lasting value to a game, the developers instead chose to bet against all odds that their game would "go viral" without any actual reason for players to want to play the game. Predictably, they lost this bet. 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. Bohnanza The Duel 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 "Noob", playing an online match (admittedly not so easy to do with no players), 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. The poor quality of this game is also 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 7 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. Unethically, the developers have left this on the Steam store in a dead, abandoned and unplayable state (because there's no players and no meaningful single player content). It's the responsibility of the developer to maintain their product, ensure it runs on all modern PCs, or if they determine there's defects and the game doesn't work, or the population dies, they should remove it from sale instead of misleadingly trying to scam gamers into buying knowingly dead/unplayable products. This is harmful to Steam and to gamers, not just because it's a direct and intentional attempt to scam people, but because it takes a share of the marketing space and visibility away from other games. It's polluting Steam and making it harder for gamers to find genuine games and for genuine indie developers who put months or years into making proper games find an audience. You're forced to sign a highly questionable yet legally unenforceable End User License Agreement. This agreement includes questionable (and possibly law breaching) privacy requirements that no gamer should ever have to engage in. Developers must learn they are here to serve gamers, not control them. I had my cat walk over the keyboard while the EULA was displaying, which fixed that problem for me. This game not only requires, but automatically and without your permission creates accounts and profiles for you on a platform run by the developer. I didn't ask for this and I didn't want it, and it's also not necessary for making multiplayer games on Steam. There is ZERO justification for this as Steam handles everything the game needs without this, this is just a consumer hostile move by a less than trustworthy developer. Gamers should be warned about this because it's completely understandable to want to avoid this product for that reason alone. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam? The developer is deliberately and unethically trying to scam gamers into paying them the farcical price of $4 USD for a game they know is abandoned, dead and unplayable. Don't give it to them. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.