Astro Joust

I suspect that if one were to dig deep enough, they might discover a good game here. The question is, how deep should one have to dig? A good game should feel like a good game from the very first time you play. The first 10 times or so I played this game, the main thought I had was, what am I missing? What key thing about this game am I not getting?

I can't help thinking that a good tutorial would make a world of difference here. The expectation, at least for me, was that this game was going to be similar to the Williams classic arcade game "Joust" and that's how I tried ti play it, but it's not Joust.

Astro Joust is an unabashed ripoff of the 1980's arcade game, Joust (copyright Atari Interactive/Warner Brothers Interactive, 1982). The only appreciable difference is the emus were re-skinned to be astronauts, which makes even less sense than the emus, and it's not enough differentiation to put the "developers" of this garbage out of risk of legal trouble should Warner Brothers decide to enforce their intellectual property rights. It goes without saying, but the unwritten rule of stealing someone else's game concept is to try to at least do slightly better than the intellectual property these "developers" are ripping off for profit.

Gameplay itself is just Joust. You bounce around a 2D retro pixel single screen arena and try to hit other emus astronauts on the head. You can "fly" by mashing the jump button, possibly the inspiration for the crap mobile app, Flappy Bird. Whoever is higher altitude when two emus astronauts run into each other wins.

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.

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.

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 4 players. The comical part about this is the game features 4 player multiplayer... and, making the very big assumption these people were all playing together, this means the game only ever once had enough players for it to be played as intended. You can't make this stuff up, it's a joke. 4 players 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.

Astro Joust 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, and the risk this game will disappear overnight if Warner Brothers hears about it, this is impossible to recommend.

Astro Joust is simple and delightful. If you have an opportunity just to play some local multiplayer games, you really can't go wrong with this. It's not the most exciting or has super refined systems, but it's a charming game and all elements of it are polished.

The controls don't work.

I attempted a single game where I found that I could only move in one direction and not jump. Not worth it at 40 pence right now.

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Review by Sven Evil - Steam's best local 4-player curator! See 100s of more local 4-player reviews at my curator page!
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Astro Joust is cheap, really cheap. So you should not judge it too harsh. Its like my english - I am not a native speaker.

Astro Joust is a competititve combat game for 2 to 4 players (no bots!) and ran fine on my system, my XBox 360 and XBox One controllers worked perfectly... but... there is just not much content in the game!

The game is inspired by Joust, an old arcade classic from 1982, where knights flying on an ostrich were duelling each other. You had to tap the button continuously to keep the ostrich in the air. In Astro Joust you have to tap the button continuously to keep your astronaut in the air. You can also use a button to dash.

Joust had a funny screen wrap feature - fly out on the right side of the screen and reappear on the left. Astro Joust does not have this. In Joust the knights were using long lances, the players in Astro Joust look like they are using power gloves... in Joust you could speed around horizontally like crazy, in Astro Joust you mostly go up and down and try to jump on your opponent's head... not much speed involved, even when you dash.

The only game mode is Deathmatch - the first player to win 3 rounds wins. That's all. There are 5 different maps to play - that's all. The achievements are extremely unimaginative, the sound is awful. The options menu is very limited, you cannot change key bindings, only choose between 3 resolutions (no FullHD, btw) and not much more.

Astro Joust does come with one innovative feature - its after-death mechanic. Dead players can take over things in the environement and attack the living. Joust can be a little fun when playing with 3 friends, as long as everyone understands the mechanics... but this is simply not enough that I can recommend this game when there are dozens of better platform combat games out there...

Conclusion:
You can spend a buck for worse things.

Update: I have found people to play with, and its honestly one of the most fun games on Steam. Its leaps and bounds better then the shit you see on this place. Its simple but hits right at the core of fun. The after death effects are almost more fun than trying to win. Its incredibly clever and the art is fantastic. I really hope the creator makes wallpapers available, otherwise if you screenshot the game during play it makes an instant wallpaper thats super beautiful.

While I really enjoyed the prior games by Mutant Entertainment, this one isn't as enjoyable. I didn't realize it was just local multiplayer until I got the game. Because of that, and lack of people to play with locally, I have been unable to even play the game until I find someone.