Solar Shifter EX

Solar Shifter EX is yet another of literally hundreds of retro arcade bullet hell/shoot 'em ups infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. This one has almost passable graphics which is nice to see, and there's a shifting mechanism that doesn't add all that much to the game.

This is an old and dead genre, and while some professional production quality went into making this, it still ends up having less than average quality gameplay, with some rather janky collisions and what ultimately is a less than enjoyable look and feel. It's also 9 years old, and while Unity does give it 4K support, it's not really enough. I'm not even sure this is a "maybe".

From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

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 furthermore 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.

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. Solar Shifter EX 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 "Welcome to Bullet Hell!", starting the game, trivial to achieve, but less than 10 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 modest spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, and isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 10 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.

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

Solar Shifter EX has the almost unethical 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.

For comparison, the $5 asking price for this game could get you games like "Don't Starve Together", "This War of Mine" or "Battlefield V". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.

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