The ideas of a bullet-hell shmup with none of the polished audio, visual, or gameplay elements. Acceleration on your vehicle gives you a sluggish, floaty, imprecise feeling when you try to dodge bullets and stuff. Worst part about it is it gave me motion sickness because of how the camera is always moving based on where you are facing, but also because of the acceleration component of the turning and moving. The gameplay/level design is very old school and simple and consists of completing a certain number of objectives per map. A lot of times you'll be shooting at enemies offscreen or they'll be shooting at you, which is stupid and not fun.

This game doesn't offer much to those who aren't inclined to enjoy a top-down shooter. Its not poorly done, but I think for most of us this style of game isn't very enjoyable anymore.

This game is almost good. But it's far too boring. The music is horrible, the sound of the gun shooting (which you hear constantly since all you do is hold the shoot button) is one of the most annoying sounds I have ever heard. THe difficulty is nice, but it doesn't have any incentive to play it.

Plus the developers are obnoxious brats who had their metacritic score removed from the store page because it was bad.

Apart from this being a boring game with controls so bad that it causes dizziness, I don't recommend this game because of the behaviour of the developers themselves.

Because of its low User Score on Metacritic (4.7 out of 10), the devs made an official announcement where they asked gamers to spam-vote perfect 10s in order to manipulate the result, while at the same time calling those who gave them low reviews "morons" and "trolls", among other insults. When I and a few others remarked on how unprofessional that was, we had our comments and posts deleted, as well as our names included in a very public "Hall of Shame" (which was also deleted a few days later) where the developers attempted to ridicule and humiliate us as "trolls".

When almost no one posted any favourable user reviews on Metacritic, they asked Steam to remove their Metacritic score from the game's store page, as it gave them bad publicity (and that's why it's no longer here), but not before one of the developers (called Alexander "motorsep" Zubov) posted a fake review, giving his own game a 9 out of 10.

Companies that behave this way don't deserve any business.

The game is mediocre at best; horrendous controls/camera married to utterly average content.
What takes this from 'blah' to (a more enthusiastic vomit noise) is the complete lack of integrity on the part of the developers. Do /not/ give these people money.

This game is awful. The camera is so poorly designed that it is the only game I have ever played that made me feel sick; my friend and I couldn't even last 20 minutes of gameplay time without feeling nauseous. Save your money and skip over this one.

MY NECK HURTS.

OH GOD THIS CAMERA

I got this as part of a bundle for free and I regret it. Painfully generic combat and graphics.

At its core, Steel Storm: Burning Retribution is a truly fun and exciting shooter game. It has you fighting off waves of enemy tanks while trying to meet various map objectives (sometimes through up-sized levels).

The game features 19 levels in the main campaign; an additional 8 level user generated campaign plus an additional 6 maps for skirmish play rounds up the collection. Multiplayer is a doozy with Deathmatch and CTF. Their latest add-on: a free MOBA style game currently in its alpha development stage known as AMMO - Armored Modernized Mobile Operations is great fun to play.

So, if you like a "free-range" style shooter that has you exploring huge maps, then this game is for you!

Frequent audio clipping with grating sound effects, bad music, unplayablely strong framerate drops, one dimensional gameplay (dodge shots while holding down M1), uneven difficulty, enemy reinforcements teleporting into the fray ala DA2... the list goes on. I would love to say "support the poor starving indie devs!" but this game has no redeeming value because of all the technical and core gameplay problems. Supposedly there is 16-man online multiplayer but I can't imagine the input lag considering more than one explosion on the screen put you into single digit framerates.

I got this in the humble indie bundle 3 so I got my money's worth but if you're looking for a shmup/bullet hell on steam, pick up Jamestown instead.

Very average "shooter" kind of game. The AI gets annoying at times like spawning all around you to overwhelm you; then you die... then you restart at the beginning of the level... without your startup weapon.

DISAPPOINTING... DO NOT BUY!

Pretty ♥♥♥♥ game. Only reason I own it is that it came inside the Humble Bundle (which thankfully included far superior games like VVVVVV, Cogs, and And Yet It Moves)

It's a pretty fun top-down shooter even if it feels a bit amateur-ish at times. As a warning, it gives Umbaglo motion sickness to play, but doesn't bother me. Your mileage may vary here.

Controls are weird and floaty but tolerable. Combat is fun, definitely the strongest point of the game, but there isn't nearly enough of it. Most of the time you wander around levels looking for keys and switches wondering why there's nothing to shoot at. Enemy shots are often the same color as the ground, so it's hard to see them coming at you. Don't bother.

if it rained steel people would die

This game is both solid as can be and at the same time unpolished. The gameplay is great but in these days of so-called "AAA" titles people turn their nose up at the aesthetics. I think this is why metacritic gave it a low score. But in any case the game deserves some respect due to a few things that in a very noble move, it did not advertise as a feature.

One of these things is the fact that it uses netradiant and the darkplaces engine (themselves a fork of GtkRadiant and the Quake engine). Both of these are free software and licensed as such. The source code and what modifications were made to the editor and engine respectively are included on zip files with the distribution.

To my knowledge this is one of the few games on Steam that have free code and moreover ship that free code along with the install. It is very humble about this fact, and I am guessing I am one of the few people aware of this as it requires looking in the install directory.

In other words, this video game is a massive open source/free software and classic-game-nostalgia love-fest.

Very fun singleplayer & multiplayer experience. I got this game through the Humble Bundle and it was one of the first games I could run on Linux. Consider grabbing it if you like arcade games that involve shooting at enemy ships with an overhead perspective.

2/10
Thank god I only wasted 80 Cents on this.
It's horrible.

Played it for 10 minutes; didn't like it. It looks unpolished and messy at times with all the overlays. But if you like shoot 'em ups, I guess you can giv... no wait, don't give it a try. There are a dozen other schmups that ARE fun AND polished. Continue your search.

[Rating: 60/100]

Steel Storm: Retribution is a good indie attempt at the shoot’em up genre, but if this came out as an AAA title, it will instantly fail. In terms of graphics, this game is average at best, the lighting is very low-key. I would say it is about the same as Zombie Driver in terms of graphics. The level design, although very nicely colored, is extremely repetitive. The layout is different yes, but the core mechanics of beating the map is the same. On the other hand, the weaponry in this game is fantastic, it’s a shame the devs implemented them completely wrong. Instead of making special weapons into an upgrade system, they made it based off of cool down. As a result, they immediately killed off any chance of re-playability for the game. On the bright side the enemy mechs are nicely done, they look fantastic and the bosses do offer much difficulty and requires mad kiting skills to kill. Overall an okay game to play with some friends for about 15 minutes before boredom kicks in.