250ms

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"Bro, this game made me realize I have the reaction time of a potato. 🥔💀 Enemies flash green for 250 milliseconds, and if you blink, it's over. My brain sees the green, but my fingers be like: 'nah.'

250ms is one of literally thousands of retro 2D platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere... and I'm not kidding. Searching for "platformers" on the Steam store page yields over 17,000 results! Is this one of the best of those? Absolutely not. This is one of the laziest "platformers" I've seen for a long time, the developer didn't even bother with real art assets, it's just a bunch of pixel blobs and single screen platformer levels... what was the game plan here? "I'll make something with worse graphics and less features than platformers from the 1980's, then I'll be rich"?? Why is this good for gamers? Platforming is an old, mostly dead genre, and this lacklustre experience, while it doesn't have an upfront cost, isn't saving the genre... it's no surprise this failed to capture any attention from gamers in the era of immersive 3D gaming. This features really godawful pixelcrap "art" instead of real graphics. It's hard to say if this was because the developer didn't have the skill to do the job of creating 3D visuals, or couldn't afford to hire someone who does, but it also doesn't matter. What matters is that this looks mu…

For a reaction-based platformer built around completing stages quickly and trying to minimize deaths, 250ms is a strange omission from Steam's achievement system. There are no Steam achievements or Trading Cards, despite having plenty of obvious milestones such as completing stages, defeating different enemy types, finishing with few deaths or beating the game within certain times. The core idea is simple but interesting, yet without any Steam progression or additional goals, there isn't much reason to keep playing once you've seen what it has to offer. It's free, but it feels extremely barebones.

The premise just isn't very compelling. I'd enjoy it a lot more if there were some kind of difficulty options.