Bishi and the Alien Slime Invasion! Reviews

Game is fun enough but cannot get controller support

Bishi and the Alien Slime Invasion! is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro pixel platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. This one is certainly and without a doubt one of the worst platformers on Steam, and that's including the garbage Russian Construct-2 asset flips glutting the store. This really is worse than those. This is basically a Super Mario Bros ripoff, but the "developer" couldn't work out how to use the craptastic GDevelop construction kit to allow the user to headbutt blocks. Bad graphics, awful gameplay, even worse technical implementation. 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 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. 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 code-free drag-and-drop video game construction kit/toolset, GDevelop. This is a very poor quality toolset sometimes used by amateur/unskilled developers as it doesn't require advanced game development skills, 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. 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, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. Bishi and the Alien Slime Invasion! 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.

Nice little platformer. easy to master with some tricky situations. rising lava level...check water level....check air level....check ha its all there what even are those purple things and why are those fish like beasts from hell.

Fun little platformer! Definitely worth the low asking price. Probably around 1-2 hours to beat (depending upon how good you are at platfomers). Quite straightforward levels but very charming hand-made graphics and funny voice acting. Plenty of fun, jokey references in there as well. Good checkpointing for the most part - and unlimited lives, thankfully! - but it also gets quite challenging later on. Some tough boss fights too but they never felt unfair, just required some very precise play. One small gripe is that it only saves progress permanently after beating a boss, so you can't just hop on and play one level. Overall very enjoyable though!