The Slaughtering Grounds

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The Slaughtering Grounds
The unholy grail of Steam shovelware.
Genre(s): First-person shooter Platform(s): Microsoft Windows Release Date: October 31, 2014 Engine: Unity Developer(s): Digital Homicide Studios Publisher(s): Digital Homicide Studios Country: United States

The Slaughtering Grounds is a zombie first-person shooter game developed and published by Digital Homicide Studios. It was released for Microsoft Windows on October 31, 2014, via Steam before being permanently removed after the developer was banned from Steam for filing a lawsuit against Steam customers. The game is considered to be one of the worst games on Steam, one of the worst games of 2014 with Air Control and also one of the worst games of all-time and also one of the worst, if not the worst FPS game of all-time.

Plot

Judging by the character bios, you live in a post-apocalyptic world flooded by blood-thirsty zombies. You can control either a biker named Snake, a US military soldier named Bob, or an unnamed LAPD SWAT officer through three scenarios of the wasteland.

The objective is to fight the zombies until a timer runs out. Your only help is a cargo plane that periodically drops ammo. Sometimes you will be attacked by special enemies such as mummy-looking zombies and a giant demon-like creature.

Gameplay

The game consists of 3 levels that look and consist of practically the same thing (i.e. getting from one place to another and eliminating hordes of opponents, which are more and more on the map). After completing the third level, the player returns to the beginning of the first level and everything starts again and so on.

Why It Should Be Slaughtered

1. It costs $10 at launch despite being obviously unfinished and nowhere ready for release, not even as an Early Access title which clearly shows that the developers did not know moderation at all and simply stuck the game for the first possible price when the game should be rather free.
   • Experienced game developers stated that there was so little real work behind The Slaughtering Grounds that the entire game could be developed within a single day or even a few hours.
2. Massive glitches and programming errors, such as a plane moving sideways and glass floors being completely invisible leaving you standing or walking in mid-air. This is because the game is mostly made out of pre-made assets with little real work nor bug testing, in other words, the developers didn't even want to test the game and they were making this game just in a hurry to release this game as soon as possible. This style of game development is now known as "asset flipping".
   • Due to the game being made out of mismatched stock assets, such as cartoony models mixed with realistic ones and similar, the visuals are very ugly.
3. Despite looking different, all the enemies have the same AI behavior so it's only 1 enemy type with different skins. The zombies have zero AI besides chasing and tackling the player. Once they start chasing you, they never stop, there's no option to sprint to get away from them, you can't outrun them, and once you run out of ammo, it becomes impossible to get rid of them, and again, we are dealing here with proof that no one even tested this game and that the developers were so lazy that they did not even want to balance the game or even create separate opponents that would differ in more than just texture and model.
   • Enemies never stop spawning! You'll quickly find yourself being chased by a huge mob of zombies that just keeps getting bigger and bigger, and then even bigger so even with a full warehouse, you have no chance to win against all this horde of opponents.
   • If that wasn't enough, the zombies give you damage not by hurting you, but rather, by simply touching you!
4. Abysmal frame rate that frequently drops. The insanely huge amount of enemies on the map causes the frame rate to drop even worse although the game looks like it was released in 2000 rather than in 2014.
5. Dying doesn't reset any timers or even end the game so there's no punishment for dying. Dying gets rid of the mob of enemies chasing you so dying may benefit you. The game is impossible to win because clearing objectives just resets them and clearing level 3 returns you to level 1, and also completely impossible to lose because failing to clear objectives does nothing and you have unlimited lives, and this is even worse than in arcade games from the 70's, because even their death was punishable and the gameplay itself. Not only it becomes boring very quickly, but it also makes no sense at all, if you do the same thing without much purpose.
6. There is no replay value whatsoever. The game only has useless unlockables which are very expensive, that is, after completing these 3 levels as in Ninjabread Man, you probably won't even want to come back to this game, especially because of all the flaws that this production has.
7. Weapons aren't properly lined up with the aiming reticle; some of them block your field of view so again, the developers, if they ever tested this game at all, just didn't shoot, especially with a sniper.
8. No audio or visual cues to let you know an enemy is attacking you off-screen which can lead to very cheap deaths that you won't even know how to prevent or worse, you'll have to spin back and forth non-stop to make sure you don't die as if the developers were so lazy that they didn't want even such a simple thing to do.
9. The timer counts 61 seconds per minute. When the minutes counter counts down, the seconds counter incorrectly resets to 60 seconds instead of 59 causing a leap second to occur every minute.
   • The standard timer included in Unity already counts minutes correctly, meaning this mistake had to be done on purpose.
10. The only way to clear a stage is to run the timer out, which takes 16 minutes & 16 seconds. You can beat the game by starting level 1, and then literally leaving the game unattended and doing something else for 48 minutes & 48 seconds. In other words, the game is incredibly unfinished, and it looks like it was made in a big hurry without even bothering with the fact that you can go off the map like in Big Rigs.
11. The radar indicating where the enemies are doesn't move or rotate when you do, making it completely useless because it doesn't correctly tell you where the enemies are which clearly shows that the developers didn't care how the radar and anything else in the game worked and just took care of it to earn as much as possible.
12. Pausing the game doesn't pause the game. The pause menu appears, but the gameplay is not suspended, leaving you defenseless, so you can't even leave the game for even a minute, because if you do it, you will automatically die, due to the growing number of enemies.
13. There is only one type of ammo you can pick up. When you pick up ammo, it reloads the gun you're holding, which makes it pointless to use anything besides the stronger weapons, which is incredibly outdated for 2014, and one could get the impression that the development of the game began in 1991, and was completed only in 2014 and is of course also proof that the developers did not even try.
    • Even games from over 20 years ago knew how to make different types of ammo pickups.
14. When you die, the zombies stomp on your corpse, which somehow causes you to take damage before respawning so you'll respawn with your health below 100% which is unforgivable because they can't refine anything, and even in Doom from 1993, they were able to do something like that.
15. The only music in the game is a short obnoxious loop that never stops and it lasts only 10 seconds, which is not much longer than in Hong Kong 97, which makes it incredibly quickly annoying and will make you want to mute your computer's speakers so that you don't listen anymore, that is, the developers simply didn't even have an interesting idea to compose something much more tolerable to listen to.
    • Also, the music doesn't fit right with the overall atmosphere of the game.
16. The blood splatter effects were taken from images found on Google Search. You can see how the white backgrounds on the images weren't cut out properly, leaving white pixel artifacts on the images. Digital Homicide eventually replaced the blood splatter effects with a new transparent set, but still a blatant Google search regardless simply put, the developers instead of creating their textures and just taking them off the goggle graphics were lazy to this extent.
17. There are only 3 levels, and each level is almost the same. The first level spawns so many zombies, that the frame rate chugs heavily with just 3 endlessly repetitive levels, it's incredibly repetitive gameplay that beats many games from studios like Phoenix Games or even Blast! Entertainment in terms of boredom.

Reception

The Slaughtering Grounds is infamous for starting the Digital Homicide controversies after the developers attacked anyone who said anything negative about the game. Several YouTubers went on to declare The Slaughtering Grounds as one of the worst games of 2014, one of the worst games on Steam, one of the worst, if not the worst FPS game of all time, and even one of the worst games of all time, including Angry Joe, Jim Sterling, Caddicarus, Projared, etc.

Darklordjadow1 featured this game during his first Indie game review special. When reviewing the game, he said: "The entire game feels like nothing was ever finished, like they didn't know how to program objectives, timers, AI, or ammo so they just left this unfinished shit in the game that doesn't work!"

James Stephanie Sterling (known online as Jim Sterling) on the other hand was caught in a long-lasting feud with Digital Homicide which escalated to a lawsuit against her which started after she did a first impression of Let's Play of the game.

Videos

This is Jim Sterling's Let's Play video that began the Digital Homicide controversy.

This is also reviewed by Angry Joe as "Top 10 worst games of 2014".

DLJadow's review of this game as a part of the first part of the Steam Indie Games Review trilogy

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