"Chronicles of Vinland" was, well, "I can't believe it's not a mobile app." This "game" was one of those clumsy mobile apps where you tap on a bit of land and a building pops up, and then you tap on it every now and then to "collect" the resources it generates, which you then use to tap on some other plot of land to make another building spring up. You can also trade resources. The objective of the game is to amass enough resources to pay off/absorb other tribes until you "win" by meeting all the objectives. Really, some of the worst kinds of mobile apps were like that.

And I'm using past tense here because the developers wisely yanked this off Steam, probably to avoid being whacked by Valve for the apparent review manipulation, or maybe they just realized the error of their ways... I sure would like it if more amateur developers would follow suit.

The game was very very short and could be finished in less than 2 hours. Developers have at least some responsibility to provide enough content to make a game last more than 2 hours if they're serious about providing something of value to gamers. There's less content here than some free game demos.

From a technical perspective, the game didn'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 did was scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which made 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 controls couldn't be customised because the game had such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just iPhone screen tapping stuff. The fact that the interface was this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this was a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'd get none of that here.

This looked and felt like a mobile app, but it doesn't seem to have made it to the app stores. It's unclear why this was put on Steam instead of the app stores it seems to have been designed for. Maybe it was removed, maybe it was rejected by Apple and Google (they do have more rigorous quality standards than Valve does for Steam, after all). Thankfully it's now also removed from Steam, so gamers are better off.

Regardless, for all intents and purposes "Chronicles of Vinland" might as well have been a mobile app, it had the same limitations and dumbed down qualities. It's impossible to recommend such a game to PC gamers. We don't spend all this money building gaming rigs so we can pretend they're iPhones and play games that might as well be mobile apps.

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

The game never really caught on with the millions of gamers on Steam, with a very low peak player count close to launch, and then just a handful of players launching this game every couple of days. This is undoubtedly caused by factors such as those raised in this review. It's always helpful with buying decisions to consider how popular and successful the product is, and unfortunately while this did accumulate a few participation trophy reviews, overall, people just didn't play it.

This game featured a number of suspicious, likely fake positive reviews. The reviews all appear at almost exactly the same time, very shortly after the game launched on Steam, all have a direct Steam purchase of the game, and all have very similar wording and writing style in Russian. Immediately after this huge peak of reviews, reviews (and player counts) for the game dropped incredibly sharply. This was highly unusual given the very low quality of the game and poor player counts. The "Positive" review score on this game should be taken with a large grain of salt. This might have been done to deceive/mislead gamers into paying for a bad product.

So, if you can get your hands on a key to the abandoned mobile app in the wrong place, since you can't buy it, don't bother.