ScourgeBringer is a mobile app that's been dumped on Steam as if it was a real PC game (it's not)... it's a cash grab from greedy mobile devs. This mobile app is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere.

As a "roguelite", this mobile app (which, I will at least admit does "work" and isn't completely clunky compared to other platformers) doesn't have actual content per sei, it's just samey repetitive algorithms used as "ez-mode" so the developers didn't need to bother creating content. As a result of this terrible decision, the mobile app gets boring and repetitive almost immediately. Procgen is not an acceptable substitute for real content.

From a technical perspective, as a mobile app, this 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 mobile app, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the mobile app, 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.

Because this is a mobile app, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the iPhones that the mobile app was designed for. These are unfortunate handicaps and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was an afterthought for the iPhone developers who are to blame for this. The mobile app is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for mobile phones forces upon a game. Once more, mobile devs have made gaming worse for everyone. I didn't spend thousands on building a gaming rig just so I could pretend it's an iPhone.

These technical defects push this mobile app below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

It's important to note that, despite this being such a low quality product, there's a number of positive reviews that all appeared immediately after the game launched, from suspiciously inactive Steam accounts that have reviewed almost no other games apart from this. Take the review score of this game with a grain of salt.

So, should you buy this mobile app? Is this one of the best of the 130,000+ games on Steam?

Once more we see greedy mobile devs trying to scam PC gamers. On Steam, this is $17 USD, on app stores, it's $7. Mobile devs must learn PC gamers are not here to be gouged, and can't be expected to pay OVER TWICE THE PRICE for an already overpriced mobile app just because it's been lazily dumped on Steam.

This is unacceptable disrespect for PC gamers. No pixelcrap is worth $17. If mobile app developers want to get paid the same kind of money as real game developers who know how to do graphics properly, they need to learn how to do graphics properly. Because this is a mobile app, is priced to insult and gouge PC gamers, and because of the other defects, it's impossible to recommend.

Just who do they think we are?

Well, this game kicked my ass. Makes the criticism I’m about to dish out feel unfair, especially with how little time I’ve invested, but I don’t have the motivation to keep going.

My playing experience was pretty positive at first blush. The graphics were clean, the gameplay straightforward, and I really enjoyed floating between enemies with airborne strikes to combo whole rooms. However, things began to feel pretty grindy. There are only five levels, but you need to defeat all the enemies in each room to make your way through each level, usually multiple spawns, and you have to beat a miniboss before you can unlock the level boss. Add to that facing the same enemies over and over again, and level navigation quickly becomes a slog. I realized that I needed more skill tree unlocks to progress further, but those require grinding minibosses for the unique currency, which require clearing lots of rooms.

Along the way, each mistake takes away damage, but it’s always small mistakes that feel hard to adapt to without heavy concentration. I struggled to finish the first stage even after turning on adaptive difficulty and increased health drops. I admit to being careless, even just bad at the game, but I can’t help but feel that there’s a bit of roughness underneath the smooth flying exterior. There’s too much of a delay to your attacks and parries; I feel like I should be able to react to an enemy getting up in my face, but can’t. I want to believe that a better player would be able to better utilize the floating attack to get around this, but I just don’t know.

You also need the jump, regular attack, and smash all at the ready to get through combat, but where does that leave your ranged weapon? Between all of that, plus the dash, there isn’t an elegant way to incorporate the ranged weapon into the control scheme as you zoom across the screen. Maybe that’s why the default control assigns it to the trigger. It uses up all of your ammo, but otherwise you’d struggle to use it at all, even though you should be using it constantly to mitigate risk.

Aside from the aforementioned difficulty modifiers, there is “invulnerability,” which prevents you from taking damage. To be clear, I’m pro-accessibility, and I almost always prefer player control over gatekeeping. Challenge should be self-made and evident by the conditions you set for yourself. That said, there’s way too much of a gap between the other options and this one, which essentially is a “win without opposition” option.

Playing with the setting just to see what the rest of the game looks like also really put into relief the other issues of the game, not just the slow pacing, but the lack of distinction and flavor from a narratological standpoint. I can’t remember for the life of me what was in the apocalypse logs I discovered. The back-and-forths between the friendly NPCs doesn’t deliver much personality or intrigue between room after room after room of, again, the same enemies for each level, most of them in multiple waves you have to wait to spawn. Later levels look like reskins of old ones with minor gameplay adjustments. It’s all bugs, blobs, and eyeballs, and they got even slower to defeat. I can’t imagine what beating this game “legitimately” would have entailed.

I’m not angry at this game. It never inflicts an injury strong enough to inspire true gamer rage, which is also a problem. It doesn’t skewer you, it boils you like a frog, so I didn’t feel a strong impetus for improvement. If you like to think your way through difficult platformers and roguelites, you might be able to find what I couldn’t in this game, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. In addition to its grueling gameplay, Scourgebringer lacks visual and narrative panache that can be easily found in better roguelites.

midia papãin