"Merchants of Kaidan" is an older game from 2014. It's a venerable 10 years old at the time of this review. This is a "trading" business simulator game with some RPG elements, and most of the gameplay takes place in static dialogues, a bit like a spreadsheet simulator but you don't get to see the spreadsheet. You do get to see some mediocre hand painted artwork and scenes.

Now, I'm reviewing this game on basis of the majority of the gameplay, which is the 2D interfaces. There is a somewhat low poly 3D map that you sometimes interact with, and even some 3D minigames, but these are of very low quality and don't reflect the core of the game.

The overall trading game works, you buy low, sell high, have dialogues, do simple "quests" and so on, but this becomes tedious very quickly... remember this game is on the same platform as Counter-Strike, Helldivers 2 and Grand Theft Auto. This kind of "could-be-done-as-a-webpage" game has to be incredibly good to compete with those kinds of professional AAA games, and it isn't.

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

While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals.

The game features mostly static, barely animated 2D images, the kind of thing you expect to see in browser/flash games. While the artwork itself, while mediocre, might be considered passable, the visual presentation here is negligible, it might as well be a slideshow or a Youtube video. Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Asteroids had more advanced animation and visuals going on than this game does.

The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just point and click stuff like a browser/Flash game. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here.

For gameplay purposes, because the user interface for this game is mostly just 2D static images... it might as well be a browser game. And we all know, Steam isn't here to compete with Chrome and Firefox. If the game can be done in a web browser, it's just not rich or compelling enough to appeal to serious gamers on PC.

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

You don't have to take my word about how bad the game is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. "Merchants of Kaidan" has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for doubling your money within 50 days, trivial to achieve, but less than 10 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch.

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, and isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 10 percent of players bothered playing the game for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this game to have so many concurrent players who didn't bother engaging with this game? Trading cards. People will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game.

That tells us people only really bought this game for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. 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 little merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.

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

"Merchants of Kaidan" has the ridiculous price of $15 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. For comparison, the $15 asking price for this game could get you games like "Stellaris", "Grand Theft Auto V" or "Lethal Company". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.