Konrad the Rocket

A really fun platformer with interesting jetpack mechanics. One of the less frustrating deathless achievement i've had to do

"Konrad the Rocket" is a GameMaker Studio copy+paste job where you have a jetpack and fly through various 2D levels. The jetpack mechanic sucks a lot more than the regular GMS engine jumping mechanics. This is just more basic amateur shovelware polluting Steam with no real value for gamers.

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 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 controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.

PC gamers will be insulted by the demand from the developer that a console peasant children's toy controller should be used, despite this being on PC. Developers should try to be aware which platform they're developing for, and must never, under any circumstances dictate to gamers how their games are to be experienced.

Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the GameMaker Studio construction kit/toolset. This is a very poor quality toolset favoured by amateur developers as it's cheap and requires little in the way of development skill, 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. GameMaker Studio is most commonly used to make retro pixel shovelware and cash grabs.

A strong argument can be made that construction kits like GameMaker Studio should never be used to make games for profit, as the "developer", Leonardo Alexandrino has done here. These construction kits are intended to teach people some of the basic principles of game development, and to make small demos to pass around with friends. They're not intended to replace to actual work of real, professional game developers. So it's inappropriate when amateurs try to use these for profit, without any actual, real game development effort taking place. This doesn't result in products that have any real meaningful value for gamers.

The very poor quality of this game puts it squarely on-par with ancient 1990's Flash/Java games, and given it's 2023 (and this was released not so far back in 2017), gamers and the industry expect and deserve better than this kind of low effort shovelware.

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 (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.

"Konrad the Rocket" 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.

Just finished the game, feels pretty responsive actually with my only issue to do with controls/movement being that a few things feel weird as when you start flying there is no initial "jump" momentum making things have different timings to what I expect but other than that a pretty good 60-90 minute game for one run and and not attempting achievements (I can't see myself getting Konrad the Immortal any time soon)
So in summary, if you have some time free and enjoy games with difficulty greater than a good portion of modern nintendo games give this a try.

TL;DR Try this game it is fun

Very addictive indie game. The graphics and music are basic, but are quite fitting to the game. The gameplay is tight, and quite challenging, and there is a constant "one more try" feeling. Finished it in around 5-6 hours, don't regret buying it.

This game has some very solid mechanics. Love the art style, simple but effective. I've only played 5 minutes of this game but It gave me a good first impression! Keep up the good work man