Rotastic

10/10
I'm trying to 100% the game but the last few levels are so hard
i killed 3 people in 4 seconds in the game and got a different achievement O:

Rotastic is an ancient game from 2012. It's a whopping 12 years old at the time of this review. The game lacks support for the typical features of modern gaming PCs, hasn't been modernised or updated to run smoothly on contemporary machines. The game looks and feels dated. Despite this lack of modernisation, it carries a pretty high price tag for such an old game. This seems to have be lingering on Steam with an inflated price to try profit from abandonware.

The game itself is a very shallow and simple action reflexes game where you have a simple grappling hook and you must attach/detach it from various points while you swing around it endlessly. You can lengthen or shorten the grapple and attach/detatch as you need, and you need to time everything right to swing between the nodes and collect all the gems on the way. Basically if this was made today it would have been a mobile app instead of slightly worsening the entire Steam catalogue by appearing here.

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 simple, cartoony 2D graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort mobile apps. 3D graphics programming does require a degree of skill and competence and unfortunately not all developers have the budget or talent to deliver this, despite 3D graphics cards hitting the mainstream in the 1990's. 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.

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, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.

PC gamers will be insulted by the presence of console peasant children's toy controller prompts, despite this being on PC. Developers should try to be aware which platform they're developing for.

This looks a lot like it was designed for consoles, but released on Steam instead by mistake. While this is on PC, it has all the hallmarks and deficiencies of a console game, from the clunkier than needed control scheme to the less than cutting edge graphics. There's 10's of thousands of PC games on Steam, and PC gamers deserve only the best. This might not appeal to many gamers due to the lack of PC-centric design. It's unclear why this never made it to the video game console appliances it seems to have been designed for.

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 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.

So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?

Rotastic is relatively expensive for an abandonware nostalgia gouge, at $5 USD, and it's not worth it. The game is just too old, hasn't been modernised. And as the old saying goes, you can't go home again.

For comparison, the $5 asking price for this game could get you games like "Torchlight", "Killing Floor 2" or "Deus Ex: Human Revolution". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.