Star99 Reviews

[quote][b]Warning: Dead PVP Game[/b] This game has no meaningful single player content, and no playable PvP servers. There is no functioning PvP population, it's a dead game, and cannot be played as intended.[/quote] Star99 is yet another of literally hundreds of amateur 2D retro arcade bullet hell/shoot 'em ups infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. The core gameplay is immediately stale and uninteresting and a key reason this failed hard. The developers tried something new, they tried to add a PvP element and "Battle Royale" mode that really didn't blend well with the old dead arcade genre. The focus of the game is pure PvP, there's no single player content. The developer gambled that other players would be an acceptable substitute for adding storytelling, level design etc to the game. The vast majority of PvP-only games fail because they don't "go viral", and without players, or single player content to add a lasting value to the game, the game dies. Developers must learn that other players are not an acceptable substitute for adding content to a game. 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. 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. This looks and feels like a mobile app, and the developer announced an intention to publish this on the mobile app stores. Thus, for all intents and purposes Star99 might as well be a mobile app, it has the same limitations and dumbed down qualities. It's impossible to recommend such a game to PC gamers. We don't spend all this money building gaming rigs so we can pretend they're iPhones and play games that might as well be mobile apps. 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 11 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 110,000 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. The game contains stock/store assets/libraries/packages, but the "developer" here hasn't credited the people who actually did the work for the game. In some cases this breaches the license agreement the developer signed for the use of those assets. Worse, some of the assets are licensed under a [b]NON-COMMERCIAL AGREEMENT[/b], but the developer is violating those licenses [b]FOR PROFIT[/b]. This is not just a contractual/license breach, in many jurisdictions this is a breach of criminal law. Claiming credit for the work of others as well as breaching software licenses and breaking the law is highly unethical. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 110,000+ games on Steam? The developer is deliberately and unethically trying to scam gamers into paying them the pathetically optimistic price of $3 USD for a game they know is abandoned, dead and unplayable. This should have been removed, the developer kept it on Steam to try get some cash out of it. Not okay.