Alone on Mars

Absolute rubbish. Thankfully I only paid £0.39 while it was 90% off. I was attracted by the title of the game because I'm obsessed with mars (I even purchased a 10'' reflecting telescope together with several hundred pounds worth of eye pieces) so that I could observe Mars). Stupidly, I didn't bother checking the reviews, seeing the positive rating a couple of the images from the Steam store and the 90% off persuaded me to buy the game.

When I booted the game up, I was presented with a medium sized window with no option to play in full screen. When trying to play the game my mouse pointer was constantly leaving the game area and freezing my astronaut. As enemies were coming from both sides, I basically kept dying as I couldn't turn around quick enough to shoot them and repeatedly wandering out of the window and freezing again and again.

It was at this point I checked the reviews and saw my friend Obey the Fist's review; oh how I wished I'd seen it earlier as I trust his reviews implicitly. He said, the reviews are likely posted by paid for reviews and from the ones I read I must agree; apart from a few negative reviews all of the positive ones were just one to three lines of text, usually starting with Good Idea, Good Game, a Good Platformer, a good 2D survival game, a good indie game, the game is good.

Pretty monotone game. maybe its worth it when its 0,30 cents

Alone on Mars is a 2D retro pixel wave survival platform shooter that's been slapped together with the godawful GameMaker Studio video game construction kit from Yoyogames. While the art seems okay here, it's likely to have been asset flipped as the developer has shown to be acting unethically (see more below).

Like most GameMaker Studio construction kit "games", this features lazy 2D retro "art", instead of professionally done, contemporary PC graphics. Controls and resolution are locked, which pushes this below acceptable standards for PC. There isn't even a proper working full screen mode.

GameMaker Studio is a very poor quality game construction kit, and unsurprisingly results in products that have little to no value as games, especially when compared to the work of professional developers who create genuine products for gamers. Just like you can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear, you can't make a good game from a completely crap game engine. Using a video game construction kit requires little to no talent or skill as a game developer. Very often, GameMaker Studio is used to make shovelware and lazy cash grabs.

Another special note: Gnelf have a number of fake reviews on this game in an attempt to mislead gamers by creating a fake positive review score. The reviews are all from known/compromised pay-per-review accounts, all in Russian or broken English, and show as Steam purchasers (to make the fake reviews count towards the review score). The fake reviews are all posted within roughly 24 hours of the game launch. This is an appalling and unacceptable act of review manipulation.