Whilst Zeepkist might just consist of you getting inside a box with wheels and then rolling down a hill. It's seems to find a lot of fun and laughter with this super basic premise. And as such, it's super easy for anyone to join in, and here it's definitely a case of the more the better! Plus with thousands of workshop maps, you will almost certainly never run out of new content to play together.

Zeepkist is intended to be a community driven track racing game with customisable/user built tracks.

The game has been in Early Access since 2021 and while it's still getting updates, it's deep in Development Hell. The developer made a loose commitment to finish the game by early 2023, and they breezed right past that without any acknowledgement that they haven't delivered the game. There's no reasonable expectation that this will ever be completed. Whether the developer lacks the time, funds, or skill/talent required to complete a video game isn't really something gamers should be expected to accept as an excuse.

The game does "work" in that you can race around a track and you can make your own tracks, but that's about it. The peak player count was quite low for the game and now there's just a couple of dozen people playing it... I can see the appeal for an indie track racer where people aren't tied to Garfield Kart or Mario Kart or that godawful Disney racing P2W scam. But the quality here isn't enough, and the developer has acted unethically by deliberately selling/marketing the game as a completed game in bundles.

The game really lacks polish... especially visually, while I set the game to 4K, the cart was still jaggy as all hell.. it's likely the developer is rendering the game far below actual display resolution. Is that due to incompetence? It's not okay.

On the upside, the game does feature customisable controls and resolution, so at least some of the basic, minimum requirements have been met. Unfortunately there's a number of other technical defects and shortcomings which contribute to the game being difficult to recommend to gamers.

The game features lazy low-polygon "retro" assets, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the 1990s. 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.

This looks a lot like it was designed for consoles. While this is on PC, it has all the hallmarks and deficiencies of a console game, from the clunkier than needed control scheme to the less than cutting edge graphics. There's 10's of thousands of PC games on Steam, and PC gamers deserve only the best. This might not appeal to many gamers due to the lack of PC-centric design. It's unclear why this never made it to the video game console appliances it seems to have been designed for.

These technical defects push 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 couple dozen players launching this game.. and that number is in serious decline as time wears on and there's no sign at all the game will ever be completed. 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 aren't using it.

Unethically, the developer sold keys to this abandoned Early Access game into cheap, nasty game bundles, where they knew it would be advertised and sold as a complete PC game. This seems to have been done in an attempt to mislead gamers into buying a knowingly faulty, defective and incomplete product. When a developer does this for a game they have zero practical intention of completing, this is essentially a scam, an intention to get paid for a broken/unfinished product. Often this is done as an exit strategy, as the developer takes the money and runs. No refunds have been given, the developer kept all the money they took from gamers.

Another unethical act of this developer, knowing full well that this game is abandoned and they will never complete it, they are deliberately trying to scam gamers into buying it by offering it on discount and selling keys to the game from third party key resellers. It's impossible to "accidentally" discount a game. The developer looked at their abandoned game, and instead of doing the right thing and removing it from Steam, they instead doubled-down and tried to scam even more people into paying for it. Greedy, and completely unethical. Doing the wrong thing, on purpose, for money. This is not okay.

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

Zeepkist has the far too high price of $12 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, and the questionable ethical nature of the developer and/or their associates (as outlined above), this is impossible to recommend.

For comparison, the $12 asking price for this game could get you games like "Mirror's Edge", "Cities: Skylines" or "Final Fantasy XIV Online". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.

All this time I have been holding the forward key thinking I would go faster. Turns out I was wrong.