Tiny Europe

Warning: Broken Game!
This game has design/implementation defects that will render this unplayable for many gamers. The game does not launch, instead errors immediately to a "camera" related GameMaker Studio error. The game cannot be launched or played on modern Windows 11 systems.

Tiny Europe is a laughably bad, broken 2D retro pixel tower defense game. Unusual move to marry a tower defense game with crap graphics, and it failed. The game involves building a fortress in 60 seconds and then defending it against waves of enemies. The mechanics include building different types of buildings, managing resources, and hiring troops. The story focuses on survival in Europe after a cataclysmic event.

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.

Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the GameMaker Studio construction kit/toolset. This is a very poor quality toolset favoured by amateur developers as it's cheap and requires little in the way of development skill, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. GameMaker Studio is most commonly used to make retro pixel shovelware and cash grabs.

A strong argument can be made that construction kits like GameMaker Studio should never be used to make games for profit, as the "developer", Strudio Company has done here. These construction kits are intended to teach people some of the basic principles of game development, and to make small demos to pass around with friends. They're not intended to replace to actual work of real, professional game developers. So it's inappropriate when amateurs try to use these for profit, without any actual, real game development effort taking place. This doesn't result in products that have any real meaningful value for gamers.

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game, if you can even get it to run. Don't gamble on that.

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 3 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 110,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.

Unethically, the developers have left this on the Steam store in an unplayable and broken state. It's the responsibility of the developer to maintain their product, ensure it runs on all modern PCs, or if they determine there's defects and the game doesn't work, they should remove it from sale instead of misleadingly trying to scam gamers into buying knowingly defective products.

This is harmful to Steam and to gamers, not just because it's a direct and intentional attempt to scam people, but because it takes a share of the marketing space and visibility away from other games. It's polluting Steam and making it harder for gamers to find genuine games and for genuine indie developers who put months or years into making proper games find an audience.

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

The developer is deliberately and unethically trying to scam gamers into paying them the laughable price of $3 USD for a game they know is broken. Don't give it to them. This is also competing with over 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.

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.

Nice little game. Good for small sessions, but lacks enough depth to hold you for too long in a single session. Would benefit from a couple more maps, but has great music (buy the soundtrack!).