Slaycation Paradise is a handheld (Nintendo Switch) and console ported game that's also been put on Steam as a bit of an afterthought, as it's very much designed for the handheld gaming audience. The game is a 3D rendered 2D top down survival/extraction shooter where you travel to a parallel Earth (I guess it's better than just zombies) and shoot the inhabitants for a while, achieve some minor mission objectives (collect this or that, blah blah) and then extract.

You can build towers and other defensive stuff, but the effort involved in collecting materials to build these just isn't worth it, most people find that throwing up a few walls and just shooting is all you need to do when extracting. One of the better parts of the game is that there's a wide array of weapons and mods, this is really necessary because 2D top down console shooting is already one of the weakest gaming formats in the 3D era of gaming, so it needs everything it can get to try stay relevant. Unfortunately this doesn't add much to what ultimately adds up to being an underwhelming and quickly stale and repetitive gaming experience.

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

There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.

Because this is designed for handheld/portable gaming appliances, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the low power handheld gaming appliances that the game was designed for. These are unfortunate compromises and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was a second thought for the mobile game developers. The game is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for low power handhelds forces upon a game. While this might run well on a Steam Deck, we must remember the vast majority of gamers here are gaming on PC.

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 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 aren't using it.

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

Slaycation Paradise has the gamer gouging price of $15 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, this is impossible to recommend. For comparison, the $15 asking price for this game could get you games like "Wolfenstein - The New Order", "Kingdom Come Deliverance" or "Frostpunk". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.