Warning: This game behaves as spyware and collects "telemetry" and personally identifying information. While there is an option to disable this, there's no guarantee that will work. Worse, the developers turned this on by default to try to spy on as many gamers as possible. The developers will make the unverifiable claim that this data isn't personally identifying, of course that's BS as they're collecting IPs and all kinds of other information about gamers, when combined with other profiling data this can 100% identify an individual. They say it's for "QA" purposes but there's no guarantee they're not profiling you or selling your data to third parties as they spy on you. Should you trust them? Of course not... if they had any concerns about user safety and privacy, they wouldn't have built spyware into their game and turned it on by default!. There's simply no reason to trust them and gamers should avoid this game because of this unacceptable privacy invasion.

BasketBelle is an old Adobe Flash/AIR game from 2014. It's a venerable 11 years old at the time of this review.

It's a basic "platformer"-esque game but instead of platforming you use a combination of moves like ♥♥♥♥♥♥, sliding etc to solve various "puzzles"... all around shooting a hoop with a basketball. That makes it sound way better than it really is... this is a janky Flash game. Maybe some of the performance issues are caused by the spyware in it? Who knows. Spying on users... never okay.

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

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 game features somewhat lazy, simplistic "retro" looking 2D graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort Flash/browser games and mobile apps. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing.

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.

Comically, the game was written in Adobe Flash/AIR (I'm not making this up). Talk about not using the right tools for the job. Might as well try to bake a cake with a screwdriver. The extremely poor choice of game engine here is a major contributing factor to the defects with the game.

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

BasketBelle didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the game, either. It has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game didn't really capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is "Jealous Jordan", for beating the fourth chapter, trivial to get, but less than 22 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. Hardly a success story, even the people who own this game weren't interested in it.

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, around the same time that trading cards were applied to the game... so this is just card idlers getting their cards and moving on. 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 no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.

Think of this as someone coming into your home, installing a camera in your living room, and refusing to tell you who will be watching it, if they will record the footage and where they will post it. You have no control over your data once they take it from you. Do you trust them?

So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 110,000+ games on Steam?

BasketBelle has the ridiculous price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the unethical nature of the developer. Remember that if you buy a game from an unethical developer, you're putting your money at risk.

$5 for a spyware laden Flash game. What a joke.