Neutron and the Tri-Spark is a largely competent Pac-Man clone, and while it's no Championship Edition I'd started to warm to the mechanics before realizing they committed the cardinal arcade game sin - not tracking your best scores. The score in the right corner is your previous run, not your all time high, and there's no in-game leaderboard - never mind online. Some other glaring polish issues are also present, like the inability to bring up the pause menu with a controller and the total lack of title menu art, but I think those can be overlooked. It's the lack of any goal to work toward - no achievements, no high scores - that killed my desire to play more. The new enemy routines are interesting and it's a reasonable enough price, but the barebones presentation makes Neutron and the Tri-Spark a game that's hard to justify going out of your way for.

Neutron

"Neutron and the Tri-Spark" is an unabashed, copyright infringing ripoff of Pac-Man (copyright Bandai Namco Entertainment, 1980). The game is almost exactly identical with the one functional difference, it's rendered in 3D using the Unreal engine and seems to have a bunch of what look a lot like asset flipped assets in it, but the developer doesn't seem to have credited any third party creators. Interesting.

Anyway this is garbage, you can play better, more polished Pac-Man ripoffs for free so there's no reason anyone would want to spend money on this deficient version (although I do certainly hope Bandai Namco step in to protect their IP rights).

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

The game features lazy low-polygon "retro" assets, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the mid 2000s. It's unclear why the developers weren't able to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets for the game, and also irrelevant... what matters is that this looks bad as a result of their decisions, a compromise PC gamers shouldn't have to put up with.

Bewilderingly, the game doesn't include proper audio controls (they are there, they just don't work), so you can't turn off the annoying background music, you'll need to alt+tab out and stop the music using the Windows sound mixer. This is obviously not okay and it's unclear why the developers chose not to do any software testing on this garbage. I mean, if you're going to get done for copyright infringement, you might as well be in court showing off something decent to the judge?

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.

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 game all-time peak player count was only ONE player. That's right, only one person ever played this at a time. When I played this for the purposes of reviewing it, I equalled the peak player count for the game. OUCH. 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 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.

"Neutron and the Tri-Spark" is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend.

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.

This took me less than 3 Minutes to decide that this is one of the top worst PAC-MAN wannabe's ive ever played. Its ugly, its too loud looking to be clear. The Movement is wonky. The sound is boring. This is Hideous .