Arson and Plunder: Unleashed

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"Arson and Plunder: Unleashed" is a very poor attempt at creating an arcade brawler/beat 'em up (think Vendetta, Double Dragon, Golden Axe, but if they were crap even by 1990's standards). And it's bad... real bad. There's mediocre cartoony graphics, a crap story, and some of the worst gameplay to be inflicted on the old, dead, obsolete genre. The brawling, the core gameplay loop, is very shallow and repetitive... the first couple fights you have are bad... and there's nothing else to the game but endless repetition of the bad brawler mechanics. Vendetta had more depth and complexity, and that's decades older than this. Just no excuse for such poor quality and poor game design.

On the upside, the game does feature customisable controls and resolution, so at least some of the basic, minimum requirements have been met. Unfortunately there's a number of other technical defects and shortcomings which contribute to the game being difficult to recommend to gamers.

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 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.

There's a lot of mediocre Visual Novel/E-book style cutscenes in this game. So you'll spend a huge amount of time not playing the game, but clicking through endless lines of poorly written VN text cutscenes because the developers couldn't work out how to relate their narrative through the game mechanics, and decided instead it would be better to compete with reading a book for your time. We're here to play games, not watch hours of garbage intersituals.

The developers didn't design the game for modern gaming PCs, as such the display resolution caps out at 1080p, a very low resolution that became mainstream back in 2006 and became obsolete when 4K entered the mainstream in 2014. The game simply won't look right on modern gaming displays due to this failure on the part of the developers.

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. To make matters worse, there's no mouse input, despite this being sold on PC as if it were a PC game. This is unacceptable and somewhat insulting to PC gamers. It's a good demonstration of the poor attitude the developer has towards PC gamers, and this attitude has resulted in yet another defect in this game.

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 game was never accepted on 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.

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. "Arson and Plunder: Unleashed" 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 for finishing the first (tutorial) level, trivial to achieve, but less than 7 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.

Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, and isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 7 percent of players bothered playing the game for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this game to have so many concurrent players who didn't bother engaging with this game? Trading cards. People will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game.

That tells us people only really bought this game for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with little merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.

"Arson and Plunder: Unleashed" has the gamer gouging price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. This is also competing with over 9,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.

I am 32 years old.

My ex-wife and I have a daughter together, and we adopted our son together. Both are now 4 years old.

When we were going through our separation, I felt lost and unhappy. I was self-destructive. One day, I was so angry with everything spiraling out of control that I punched a concrete wall in a moment of overwhelming emotion. This resulted in breaking my fifth metacarpal in my right hand—the hand I worked with, played games with, and used to carry my children to bed—the hand I desperately needed to ensure I could continue providing.

Upon learning the severity of the self-inflicted damage, I became almost suicidal. Keep in mind that just a few months before this, I was the happiest man, with no history of depression or anxiety. I had never experienced anger outbursts, nor was I the type to break down and cry, but I was in a tough situation that truly prevented me from seeing the light on the other side.

With nothing better to do, I looked for a game I could play WITH ONE HAND while recovering. Somehow, I stumbled upon this game and read some of the comments. I decided it was worth a try... I must admit I didn't beat the game, nor did I play as much as some of you. In fact, I may have played this game for only a day or two. That being said, after doing so, I had a new joy and hope for life. I managed to leave behind the pain and suffering that had been thrust upon me. I could experience the joy and happiness of other people. I relaxed for 5 ♥♥♥♥ minutes listening to this music, long enough to realize that I would be okay.

After realizing this, I turned off the game and went back to work. My hand hurt a lot, but I was motivated. I stopped feeling so sorry for myself and became the father I needed to be at that moment, not the weak boy I was behaving like.

Today, I am close friends with the mother of my children. We don't fight, argue, or say hurtful things to each other. We are parents and friends.

Now I have 3 children. My third child is, wait, ALSO 4 YEARS OLD. The woman I am with was going through a very similar situation at the time of my separation, and we just unexpectedly stumbled into each other's lives. We have been dating for a year and are very happy together.

Moral of the story: you never know what life has in store for you, and if I had given up when all odds were against me, I wouldn't be where I am today. This silly little game helped me realize that.

Thank you.

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Arson and Plunder: Unleashed
pros:
//fast game with modern day graphics with easy controls that moves from location A to B to C and so on
cons:
//a lot of difficult battles

//good game
Personal Suggested Purchase Price: $0.49 Or Less During Sale

what if castlecrashers was a giant piece of shit? WELL HERE YOU GO!

Recommended for game farming

It plays and feels more like a mobile game. The character animations are stiff and controls are a little bit clunky. But I could live with all that if there weren't for the game breaking bugs. Sometimes the game would simply get stuck on loading screen, or it would stop scrolling to the right even though all the enemies are dead and new ones are not coming. If you want a good action beat 'em up, play Castle Crashers instead.

Downgraded version of Golden Axe- exact same playstyle- brawl while you walk. Switch characters. Light on strategy, heavy on action, bland in narrative, although I can see where the developers were trying to be funny. 4/10 Good for the fans of the walk and brawl genre, though it looks like a flash version of a game.

Awful game, at first it tempts you with its co-op, without saying clearly that it's only local, battle system at its worst, which is basically a button masher with zero strategy and entertainment. Levels are boring, enemies are boring, bosses are boring, everything is boring. If you want a hack n slash platformer, go for castle crushers or rampage knights instead

Mediocre, repetitive gameplay, no thanks

This game kind of completely kicks ass. It's challening, and it's the kind of challenging I love in beat 'em ups. It holds you down and hurls hordes of enemies at you and screams "deal with it". If that's your thing, this is your thing.

Excuse my bad english (greetings from germany) but I decide to not review in my language.

So, I bought that game, cause the feedback seemed very good, but... it really isn't my kind of game.

Pro:
- Nice looking graphics and backgrounds
- phenomenal soundtrack

Con:
- there isn't really any depht to it... you just mash or using screen-clearing magic... it's like a "Dynasty Warriors 2D Edition" without leveling or other interesting aspects
- classic Beat Em Up? You just walk forward and kill enemys, and at the next level, you walk even further with more of the same enemys, so also no need to jumping
You can just leave the background bland, the level-design is allways the same
- Survival-Mode is more of the same, just without level-progression.


Yeah, I didn't played much of this game, but there was nothing to let me play further.
It's like, I've seen everything in the first five minutes, cause after that, there was nothing special or new.
And there are much better alternatives, so there isn't really a reason for me, to play it an hour.

Sorry, but if you wanna buy the game, watch some YouTube-Video and decide then.
And fantastic music doesn't make an fantastic game... it helps alot, but here, it's just the music and some pretty graphics.



Edit: If you wanna thumb down that review, than say why. :P
So yeah, that is the first game I have, where I think, some friends of the developers praise the game und downvote the downvotes (after the review isn't an hour on steam).

EditEdit: Or paid reviews from some german community, where the review instantly get 30 thumbs up (after maybe 1-2 hours on Steam).

Not terrible. Not worth $7, maybe $1
TBH Thought it looked like castle crashers, was kind of let down. It kind of looked like it was slapped together in a couple hours. Cute kids game, but for season veterns you might want to steer clear.

Arson & Plunder is an action packed fighting game, that reminds me of the old classic "Golden Axe". With his unique artstyle and several gamemodes as "Survival", to name one of those, this game brings fun and nostalgia to your system.

If you wanna remember the old days of gaming in an unique world with love put into details, this game is totally worth it's price

Have fun M3TOXI