▼ Not recommended
4 hrs
"The Three Kingdoms Era in China 2000 years ago" is one of hundreds of low effort retro-pixel SRPG Studio asset/construction kit flips spamming the Steam catalog, made with the SRPG Studio video game construction kit. Think of SRPG Studio as a weaker, inferior ripoff of RPG Maker (already the worst thing to happen to gaming), and with more of a focus on kingdom management than party JRPG gameplay.
Like all SRPG Studio "games", this is essentially a bunch of low quality/canned assets from SRPG Studio coupled with a cringeworthy high school anime club fan fiction. The fan-fiction in this case, sigh, leaves us with yet another Three Kingdoms Era themed game that might as well be a browser app. Take on the role of some of the Three Kingdoms Era dudes and pretend to manage a kingdom, but badly, because SRPG Studio is garbage.
As with all SRPG Studio games, the poor quality engine displays badly in fullscreen and doesn't have full HD support or any graphics tweaking options, making this unacceptable for any dedicated modern PC gamer. The point can be made that the intention of SRPG Studio is to make demos and small games to pass around friends, and shouldn't be used for "professional" game development.
Like most SRPG Studio shovelware and asset flips, the game features extremely low quality copy + pasted 2D retro pixel art, looks awful, and has even worse gameplay. SRPG Studio is an absolutely terrible construction kit, and never results in games of any reasonable quality or value to gamers.
The game only displays in 4:3 pillarboxed aspect ratio. It's possible they developed this using an old CRT they found in a dumpster, or this game has been specifically designed for people gaming on PC's from 1995... either way, this isn't really acceptable in the modern era of PC gaming.
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.
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 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.
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 5 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 130,000 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 130,000+ games on Steam?
"The Three Kingdoms Era in China 2000 years ago" has the pathetically optimistic price of around $6 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. Gamers who want a good retro JRPG experience would be better off playing the originals, like Final Fantasy, Star Ocean or Chrono Trigger.
For comparison, the $6 asking price for this game could get you games like "Grand Theft Auto V", "Cities: Skylines" or "Dishonored 2". No construction kit pixelcrap is worth $6. If 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.
Like all SRPG Studio "games", this is essentially a bunch of low quality/canned assets from SRPG Studio coupled with a cringeworthy high school anime club fan fiction. The fan-fiction in this case, sigh, leaves us with yet another Three Kingdoms Era themed game that might as well be a browser app. Take on the role of some of the Three Kingdoms Era dudes and pretend to manage a kingdom, but badly, because SRPG Studio is garbage.
As with all SRPG Studio games, the poor quality engine displays badly in fullscreen and doesn't have full HD support or any graphics tweaking options, making this unacceptable for any dedicated modern PC gamer. The point can be made that the intention of SRPG Studio is to make demos and small games to pass around friends, and shouldn't be used for "professional" game development.
Like most SRPG Studio shovelware and asset flips, the game features extremely low quality copy + pasted 2D retro pixel art, looks awful, and has even worse gameplay. SRPG Studio is an absolutely terrible construction kit, and never results in games of any reasonable quality or value to gamers.
The game only displays in 4:3 pillarboxed aspect ratio. It's possible they developed this using an old CRT they found in a dumpster, or this game has been specifically designed for people gaming on PC's from 1995... either way, this isn't really acceptable in the modern era of PC gaming.
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.
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 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.
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 5 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 130,000 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 130,000+ games on Steam?
"The Three Kingdoms Era in China 2000 years ago" has the pathetically optimistic price of around $6 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. Gamers who want a good retro JRPG experience would be better off playing the originals, like Final Fantasy, Star Ocean or Chrono Trigger.
For comparison, the $6 asking price for this game could get you games like "Grand Theft Auto V", "Cities: Skylines" or "Dishonored 2". No construction kit pixelcrap is worth $6. If 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.
Profile Features Limited!
Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.
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