Pipe Mania

I loved the Bioshock hacking, though it had zero place being in that game :p
This is the best version available of this game type. Classic Mode is what you're looking for.
Wish there was a mobile version (others are more puzzle/static based, not the same.)

I got to admit, all I really wanted was a slightly upgraded version of the Win 3.1 Pipe Dream. This version is similar and offers a few nice quality of life improvements, but it makes the game unnecessarily complicated and suffers from technical issues: it manages to run slower than Crysis, has broken videos and no display settings to speak of. There is also a fairly long intro that makes each gameplay session a commitment.

Pipe Mania is an ancient game from 2008. It's a whopping 16 years old at the time of this review. The game lacks support for the typical features of modern gaming PCs, hasn't been modernised or updated to run smoothly on contemporary machines. The game looks and feels dated. Despite this lack of modernisation, it carries a pretty high price tag for such an old game. This seems to have be lingering on Steam with an inflated price to try profit from abandonware.

This is a re-hash of 1989's Amiga game, Pipe Dream/Pipe Mania, but it's not copyright infringement, it looks like Empire Interactive are a valid copyright holder for it, so that's something. That doesn't mean this is a great game... Pipe Dream has been rehashed so many times (heck, it's the hacking minigame in Bioshock), and this teenaged rehash isn't a winner. You get some different skins/game modes etc but is that really what was needed to make a smash hit out of something that would today be more fitting as a Flash game? Nope. And I'm never going to tell gamers on Steam to spend money on glorified Flash games.

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 only displays in 4:3 pillarboxed aspect ratio, due to the age of the game, it predates the 16:9 widescreen gaming standard established back in 2006. It's possible they're marketing this towards people using an old CRT they found in a dumpster, or this game is being specifically marketed towards people gaming on PC's from 1995... either way, this isn't really acceptable in the modern era of PC gaming. It's obviously not going to look right on a modern 16:9 gaming display.

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. 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 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.

So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?

Pipe Mania is relatively expensive for an abandonware nostalgia gouge, at $4 USD, and it's not worth it. The game is just too old, hasn't been modernised. And as the old saying goes, you can't go home again. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.