Tag: Steam

Temtem Early Access Impressions: Several Hours On A Broken Game


Temtem is in early access and unless you have a lot of patience for a busted game in alpha, I highly advise not spending the $35 (or your equivalent) at this stage. I also recommend not going into the toxic cesspit also known as the Temtem Discord server. It’s a hive of scum and villainy.

So Temtem has been in early access for roughly a week during which it has spent a fair bit of that time completely unplayable for many buyers. It’s understandable, the game is in early access and in the alpha stage. Unlike some people, the developers are very clear about this. Temtem also has a lot of people wanting to play it, unlike a certain shovelware shooter game, but I digress.

Let’s talk about my five hours in Temtem.

Temtem is Pokemon. You are a child starting out the game in your small town (which is laid out a lot like Pallet Town) leaving home to go out on an adventure, and you go meet a Professor of Pokemon Temtem studies who has you choose one of three Pokemon Temtem in his lab to start your journey of becoming a Pokemon Temtem master. You’ll meet your rival Max and journey through a winding series of tall grass encounters, and there are gyms dojos and Pokemon Centers Temporiams and items that teach moves, and a Team Rocket-style villainous gang.

I picked Houchic for my first Temtem since I have always wanted a psychic monster as my starter. I’m going to make a lot of Pokemon references in my coverage because while Pokemon didn’t create the genre, it’s very obvious that many of Temtem’s systems are taken directly from Pokemon. Not copying a whole lot from DigiMon. Now personally I have played the first two generations of Pokemon games and know literally nothing from any further game in the series, so all of my references are going to be from the red&blue/gold&silver era. Thank you.

Sin #1: The Forced Loss

I hate when RPGs make me lose to prove a point that could have been proven a million other ways. Alright, not a million. Half a million. When you have a pre-scripted loss in a game that’s all about strategy, it makes the player doubt how much they are really in control of the game. Temtem has your rival Max beat you down in your first fight just so the game can send the message that some Temtem are just unfairly better than others. It feels out of character for a game that otherwise starts out essentially with a Dora The Explorer “come on let’s get to it, I know that we can do it” vibe of positivity and confidence.

Considering anyone who plays Temtem is doing so because they are/were a fan of Pokemon, it’s safe to say that a majority of the population playing this game is aware of the weakness mechanic. It also strikes me as lazy because your rival Max always chooses Oree which is a digital type and has an inherent advantage over two of the three starters. It is also the only digital type Temtem at this point, making it seem like the whole class was created just so the developer didn’t have to work Max around potentially having three separate Temtem.

Sin #2: The Broken Evolution

The evolution mechanic is terrible and bound to be confusing for the average person who doesn’t ask in Discord/read the wiki since there is no chat right now. The evolution system in Pokemon has your Pokemon evolve at specific levels. Bulbasaur will always become a Venusaur at 16. In Temtem however, the evolution of a monster is based on the level that you caught them at and it is functionally broken. For example, Ganki’s evolution is 27+. If you catch a Ganki at level 1, it will evolve at level 28. If you catch a Ganki at level 10, it will evolve at level 38. If you catch a Ganki at level 22 then you can make like Willie Wonka and go fudge yourself since the soft cap for Temtem right now is 48, meaning that Ganki is not going to evolve period.

The evolution issue effectively punishes players for catching high level Temtem, as the higher level you catch a Temtem at the exponentially more grinding you’re going to have to do before that Temtem can evolve. In Pokemon you were rewarded for catching higher level Pokemon by requiring less time to level them before they could evolve. Temtem does the opposite and punishes you for it.

The goal is to push people into Temtem’s convoluted and stupidly expensive breeding system.

Sin #3: Boy This Game Is A Slog

Temtem is an MMO, so you do find a small number of simple side quests tossed into the mix. The main game? I started feeling my enthusiasm wane long before I got to the first gym, and I haven’t even gained access to the first gym.

Temtem pads its zones like a teenager’s bra, and it makes the process of entering a new area dreadful. I had to go look at the old Pokemon guides to make sure I wasn’t misremembering, but if you look at the zones in Red/Blue you’ll find that they tend to contain roughly 5-10 trainers, often on the lower end, with the added caveat that some of those trainers can be skipped and a lot of them have one or two Pokemon total. Temtem meanwhile has so. many. trainers that each zone takes a ridiculous amount of time to travel through, and very few of those trainers can be skipped.

I also had an issue with the first “gym” in Temtem. In Pokemon you come across the first gym battle pretty early on. Brock’s two Pokemon are level 12 and 14 if my memory serves me correctly, and you fight him roughly an hour into the game depending on how fast you are. To get to Brock you go through Route 1, Veridian City, Veridian Forest, and Route 2, with the option of hitting your rival in Route 22. In Red/Blue you’ll fight six trainers including the one in Brock’s gym. Temtem meanwhile has you travel through Prasine Coast (9 unskippable trainers, 3 skippable) to Briçal de Mar (town, no fights), through Thalassian Cliffs (13 unskippable trainers, 3 skippable) to Arissola, the town where Sophia’s dojo is. Sophia isn’t in town, so you need to find her by going to Gifted Bridges (12 unskippable trainers, 2 skippable) to the Windward Fort, a six floor building (15 unskippable trainers, 4 skippable), before you FINALLY unlock Sophia’s dojo (6 trainers).

So to wrap things up: Pokemon puts you up against six trainers before you fight Brock who has two Pokemon upwards of level 14. Just to get to Sophia, you need to fight a minimum of 55 trainers (64 if you fight everyone) to get to the first dojo master who has six Temtem up to level 22. Jesus Christ.

And yes, I’m aware that Temtem isn’t Pokemon. But having the literal first dojo be such an tremendous slog to reach has resulted in my experiencing burnout which should not happen this early in such a game’s story. It’s shoddy pacing and it doesn’t make me enthusiastic about reaching further dojos if this is the experience that I can expect to have going forward, by which I mean stopping every ten feet for trainer battles. I’m more inclined to give MMOs a break when it comes to increased grind, but Temtem isn’t really an MMO in the functional sense. You’re just sharing space with other people.

Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter. Actually I have a lot of opinions on the matter.

Operation Breakout: 10k Online, But Nobody’s Playing


I bought Operation Breakout because I’m willing to throw down nearly $10 on a hunch.

Operation Breakout is catching some attention over its sudden appearance on Steam’s trending games list and since this is Steam it’s probably for all the wrong reasons. If you look on the store page you’ll find 28 reviews, 8% of which are positive, and roughly one review being posted in 2019. The game itself has evidently been a massive failure in terms of users and sales.

So it came as a surprise that the game suddenly started showing over ten thousand concurrent players this week, yet nobody seems to be talking about the game. MMO Fallout Eyewitness News crew picked up a copy of the game to see what we would find within. The results were not so surprising.

As you can see in the screenshot above, there are no servers for this game. Seven thousand people logged in at the time of this writing, and yet literally not a single person is actually playing the game.

The answer? Operation Breakout has trading cards, and the most likely explanation is that a lot of game keys have been dumped on a grey market website for cheap and bought up by card farmers.

This isn’t the only suspicious title from publisher Phanom Games. Another title Fireflies has several periods in 2017-2018 where the game inexplicably spikes to over over a thousand concurrent users despite the fact that the game looks and plays terrible and a relatively small number of reviews.

 

Thanks, SirViolentDeath for bringing attention to Operation Breakout.

3rd Party Old School RuneScape Client Coming To Steam


Is Old School RuneScape coming to Steam? Maybe, but not officially.

MMO Fallout’s busy bees discovered a SteamDB listing an unreleased listing for OpenOSRS, a third party client for Old School RuneScape. OpenOSRS advertises itself as an open source client for RuneScape that provides plugins to improve the quality of life of the game, including timers, trackers, popups, and more. The app is understandably listed as free on demand and first appeared on SteamDB’s tracker way back in November 2019.

There is no word on when the client will hit Steam, as of right now it does not have a public store page or community hub. MMO Fallout will update as more details come out.

Column: Is It Safe To Admit Ashes of Creation Apocalypse Failed?


Ashes of Creation Apocalypse has ironically suffered a apocalypse of its own and is safely dead as a corpse.

Following in the line of 2019 battle royale games that nobody wanted and thus nobody played, Ashes of Creation Apocalypse is a standalone prequel to the upcoming MMORPG of a similar name; Ashes of Creation. In essence, Apocalypse is like the technical demo for a game that will ultimately be the final product.

“Fight for your survival or die trying! Ashes of Creation Apocalypse is the standalone prequel to the upcoming epic MMORPG Ashes of Creation. It is both a testing ground for new systems and content in Ashes of Creation, as well as a unique last-man-standing action game where magic, steel, and chaos reign supreme. Ashes of Creation Apocalypse is a high fantasy, free-to-play experience where no two battles are ever the same.”

Just as unique as every other battle royale game. But similar to Planetside Arena, the public did not take to Ashes of Creation Apocalypse kindly or with much interest at all. Steam charts show that the title peaked at 288 concurrent players in October 2019 and over the last three months has quickly dwindled to a peak of 21 with an average of seven. Recent reviews put the title at a 14% “very negative” rating and as I am writing this piece there is one person online probably wondering why the queue timer is reaching well over several hours.

Ashes of Creation meanwhile seems to be going just fine, thank you. Intrepid Studios is still hiring and regularly post updates on development. Hopefully Intrepid Studios will find an avenue through which to publicly test their systems for Ashes of Creation. We hear Valve has a lot of experience with focus-testing their games, and Gabe Newell will teach you the secrets of the universe if you present him with a collectible knife.

Steam Cleaned: The Mysterious Library Of $200 “Games”


I’ve come across a rather strange phenomenon on Steam and it revolves around games that look like asset flips and sell for $200. Where do these games come from? Who are they selling to? Why are they priced at two hundred smackeroos? Are they all money laundering schemes? I don’t recommend going to the links in this article and buying any of these games, unless you think that burning $200 is worth flexing on the friends who will abandon you once they realize how criminally irresponsible you are with money.

For the record I deliberately left out a number of games that were clearly for educational/training purposes, games put up on Steam for pop-up events, and titles that are clearly trolling. This is also not the complete set of $200 Steam games by a large margin, just a carefully selected sample size of those that would show up with Valve’s wonderful search engine filtering by price.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

#1: MouseRun (pictured above)

  1. Mouse Run showed up on the Steam store on December 20, 2019 and is sold by an “atm games.”
  2. The game is Chinese-made and its original title is ???? which roughly translates to “Uncle Rat Run”
  3. It costs $199.99.

#2: Strike Mole

If you really want to play Strike Mole, I have good news. You can do so without spending more than $25. Plus tax. Strike Mole is a $200 asset flip of the Unity Store game Whack a Mole and you can buy the package for $25, zip it yourself, and play to your heart’s content. Another game by a fly by night developer who happens to also be Chinese.

#3: CrisisActionVR

Crisis Action VR is another game available in English and Simplified Chinese by a developer (Pixel Wonder) that only published one game. SteamDB shows that Crisis Action VR was once $20 but in April 2018 the price inexplicably rose to $200. Maybe the developer no longer wishes to sell it? Maybe they don’t understand decimal points. Your guess is as good as mine. Crisis Action VR is the only game on this list that looks like it came the closest to being a real game.

#4: LLK

LLK is definitely a pre-bought asset package for a mobile game, of what I would be lying if I implied I had any intention of searching around for the answer to. The game peaked at 6 players on Steam and has never changed its price from the $200, so it LLK is a money laundering scheme than it has cleaned at least $1200 USD with $360 going to Valve as their cut. Who knows, maybe this is medical grade memory testing software. I wrote my name down wrong this week, maybe LLK can help.

This one isn’t available in Chinese but the developer is Chenyun0577. I’ll let you make your conclusions.

#5: NUMBER

I’m starting to see a trend here. The previous game LLK was created by Chenyun0577, and NUMBER was created by rongyao0577. Two Chinese developers with names that sound like a bot generated them? Nope, nothing suspicious here. They also released on the same day. Coincidence, surely. NUMBER had five players max concurrently playing it.

Those money launderers sure do like memory games. Maybe it helps them remember where all their money is being funneled.

#6: Adventure Trip

Adventure Trip is available on the iOS store, and I assume it doesn’t cost $200 there. Adventure Trip is available from a developer with one game and, you guessed it, in Simplified Chinese. Unlike the last games on this list, if anyone actually bought into this scheme they haven’t actually played the game. Adventure Trip has five followers but no activity charted.

This game can be played free here. Thanks Reddit.

Temtem Launches Into Early Access Today


If you ever dreamed of an MMO that looked and played a whole lot like Pokemon, do I have good news for you. Not only does that game exist, it will be playable today (January 21). So finish watching that copy of Jay and Silent Bob you ordered on Amazon and start catching those Temtem.

“Temtem is a massively multiplayer creature-collection adventure. Seek adventure in the lovely Airborne Archipelago alongside your Temtem squad. Catch every Temtem, battle other tamers, customize your house, join a friend’s adventure or explore the dynamic online world.”

Temtem goes live into early access at 1p.m. EST, so it will probably be up by the time you read this post. For more information check out the Steam page and take a gander at the trailers below. Temtem is developed by Crema and published by Humble Bundle.

Steam Cleaned: Cyber Watch Abuses Screenshot Flags, Valve Does Nothing


Update 1/21/20: Valve has finally intervened and prevented Kartikay from banning the screenshots associated with my account.

I’m going to flood this article with screenshots to emphasize how Cyber Watch is a pre-alpha product and also so they show up on Google image searches.

It’s time for another update to our Steam Cleaned piece about the underhanded shysters working on Cyber Watch. Cyber Watch for those not keeping score is a low quality piece of shovelware pushed onto Steam in a pre-alpha state by publisher Kartikay Rathi. I published my review of Cyber Watch due to the fact that this game that had clearly been cobbled together in a short time-frame had been pushed onto Steam in a non-Early Access state, and the developer has since retaliated in ways to remind us just how shady and unprofessional they are. And just like the game itself, the cover up was lazy and low quality.

Unfortunately for Cyber Watch I keep my receipts. The four reviews posted under fake developer accounts were quickly hidden from public view after I posted my expose and it got extra exposure, but the evidence is still freely viewable to anyone who wants to see it. Head honcho Kartikay Rathi even went so far as to DM me on Twitter offering a backhanded apology while simultaneously lying about the reviews being done by college friends (again, I have the receipts) and summarizing with how he apologized and it should be good enough for me.

Sorry, it isn’t. Especially since at this point Kartikay decided that he would issue community guideline violation strikes to the four screenshots I had posed to Cyber Watch’s community page, resulting in a four day ban from uploading content. I appealed the decision to Steam support and received a response from a Sarah-Lynn who was more than useless. When any dev removes uploaded screenshots for community violations, it puts a universal upload ban on that account for one day per screenshot. To top it off the screenshots have been unflagged and reflagged, renewing the community upload bans each time.

The dev team, a group of college students who act more like a gaggle of preteens, have taken to trolling from private accounts that still have their names in the URL. Take Keshav Bhadana here for example:

And of course it wouldn’t be an update without another fake review, this time from yet another account located in Uttar Pradesh, India with only one game reviewed, and it’s Cyber Watch and a whole .2 hours on the game. This one I presume is an actual college friend of the devs, and I hope for their sakes that they weren’t forced to pay money for this garbage just to do a friend a favor.

Since its launch, Cyber Watch has peaked at one concurrent player. Nobody is buying it outside of the accounts used to push fake reviews, and after this dismal show of lunacy, nobody is going to buy it. The developer is now in full meltdown mode. This is the last post I’m going to make about Cyber Watch as the game and its developer’s reputation are already a smoldering pile of ash.

Not Massive: Tower of Shades Is A Tower of Charm


Tower of Shades is one of those games that I talk about knowing someone’s going to link to it to say “oh that Connor he’s not a real gamer, look at this hipster trash he calls a game.” I don’t care, Tower of Shades is charming as hell and I enjoyed every minute of it.

In Tower of Shades the entire game is comprised of beating the final boss of an RPG. That’s it, you fight the final boss. You won’t beat the boss on your first try, your second try, your third, and so on, but the whole goal here is to reinforce the idea that you should keep trying. If you don’t keep trying you’ll never win, and if you give up then why did you start at all?

All in all, Tower of Shades might take roughly 30 minutes to complete, give or take a bit. It also costs a whole $2 on the Steam store, which is more than reasonable for what is more of an experience than a “gamer’s game.” The fight does require you to think strategically, and each time you get a bit closer to beating the boss the game encourages you to keep on keeping on. Keep trying, even if you fail now you still have another chance.

One warning I will offer is that Tower of Shades has a few points where there is extreme flashing lights. The game has a warning at the beginning, but it is definitely not safe to play for those with epilepsy.

Otherwise Tower of Shades is a very uplifting game and I recommend it to anyone who needs a quick confidence boost. Check it out, nerds.

Steam Cleaned: Cyber Watch Dev Manipulates Review Scores To Counter Mine


Update 1/17/20: Cyber Watch is still up to its shadiness. Another positive review from a user who created their account on January 15 expressly to play Cyber Watch and nothing else and leave a positive review within 24 hours of creating their account.

In addition, our friend kaushikarathi7 has changed their name and moved from India to Germany.

Original Story:

Cyber Watch’s developer is dumb, they are really dumb, for real. And they just made a fatal mistake.

Cyber Watch is a low quality Unreal shooter that I chatted about just a day or so ago, and I went back on the Steam page today because I wanted to see if anyone else got duped into buying the game and left a review. What I found was even better, three positive reviews two of which contain snarky references to my commentary on the game. Even better, they all come from relatively new accounts with one product. Let’s dive in.

The first review is by a user named bhadana9474, a new account that owns one game and hails from Uttar Pradesh, India which also happens to house Cyber Watch’s developer. Keshav Bhadana, where have I heard that name before? Oh right, he’s listed as a developer for Cyber Watch. I like how he references the developer’s inexperience as “from what I can tell,” as though he only has second hand experience and isn’t actively working on the title.

Now let’s look at review #2:

Another account that only owns one game from Uttar Pradesh, India. What are the odds! Ashish Chaudhary…where have I heard that name before? Okay you know where this is going, Ashish is also a credited developer on Cyber Watch.

Oh my lord, a third account that only owns one game and hails from Uttar Pradesh, India. WHAT ARE THE ODDS? 100% evidently. Kaushika Rathi, where have I heard that name before? Actually this is one is a trick since there is no Kaushika Rathi listed in the developer section. There is however a Kartikay Rathi. Related to the developer? Boy it would be a hell of a coincidence if someone named Rathi from the same area of India just happened to set up a Steam account, only buy Cyber Watch, and leave a positive review within the same time span as the actual developers and after playing ten minutes.

I was born on a day and that day wasn’t yesterday.

Review manipulation is of course grounds for immediate termination, and the attempt to manipulate Cyber Watch’s review score is just as poorly thought out as the game itself. All images referenced above have been archived in order to keep the data sealed fresh for your enjoyment.

Source: Archive, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7

Demonstrably: Citywars Savage Is A Cute Little Demo


This week I played the demo for an upcoming MMO called Citywars Savage.

Citywars Savage is a quaint little upcoming MMORPG with a pretty cool premise. On the surface the game promises hack and slash combat coupled with crafting and resource management. Dig a little deeper and on the list of planned features you’ll find the ability to build and claim your own territory to battle against other players and their cities.

The demo itself took me roughly 45 minutes to play through, it takes you through a mostly linear pathway where you’ll learn how to make money, how to buy and equip better gear, and battle it out against the monsters dotting the small landscape. If Citywars showcases any idea well, it’s how good you can make a game look with some filters, lighting, and fog effects. It runs great, and ends with you killing the Death Knight.

Of course the big feature that’s being advertised with Citywars is the ability to hire and program your own NPCs. Looking at the store page, Citywars will have a graphical interface to streamline the process of coding your own NPCs to do stuff like gather resources and handle crafting while you’re out doing better things. I’ll be fully satisfied if I can program my NPCs to chatter while they are going about their business. It’ll be like having my own RuneScape bot farm.

I’m pretty sure I also encountered a dev while playing, as the game has voice chat and immediately zipped over to me and started chatting about how to access various interfaces. Now that’s customer service.

I can’t wait for more of Citywars to come out and I recommend checking out the short alpha that is available on Steam.