Circle Empires Rivals is an interesting take on the RTS genre with maps made out of small circular fields interconnected at the cardinal points. Now, the graphics are pretty bad (heck, even Warcraft III had 3D graphics, 23 years ago!) and while bad graphics normally go hand in hand with bad gameplay, it's not so bad here, with a lot of depth you expect from classical RTS games.. a big plus, but let down by a weak technical implementation (which is the difference between this being mildly successful and a triple-A smash hit).

One important note is that even though this is an amateur project, it does seem to be sincerely and genuinely made. I couldn't find any flipped assets, plagiarism or any other kind of insincere actions from the developer, but unfortunately genuine intentions alone are not enough to produce a brilliant PC gaming experience.

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

While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals.

The game features simple, cartoony 2D graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort mobile apps. 3D graphics programming does require a degree of skill and competence and unfortunately not all developers have the budget or talent to deliver this, despite 3D graphics cards hitting the mainstream in the 1990's. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing.

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 110,000+ games on Steam?

Circle Empires Rivals has the gamer gouging price of $16 USD (plus DLC!), 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 $16 asking price for this game could get you AAA games like "Monster Hunter Rise", "New World" or "Factorio". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.

Unfortunately Steam reviewers aren't presented with a "Maybe" option... if they did, that's what I'd choose. This isn't a completely bad game, but it's also not one of the best. As always, if you read my review and you can overlook the negatives I've called out, or they just aren't important to you, then by all means go ahead and buy this.