PARTICLE MACE
Worth it · Shooter · 2015
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $4.99.
- Length
- 3h
- Value
- $1.66/hr
- Reviews
- 88% positive
Watch this gameOne email when it is worth buying. Your call on what that means.
Get one email when PARTICLE MACE is worth buying.
One email per game. Unsubscribe in a click.
Minimum on the Steam store: 2 GB of memory, 102 MB of storage. Windows only.
A space game about swinging trash into things and dying.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
October 2015 is where it bottomed out, at $0.19. Its cuts run 90 percent off as a rule. There have been 45 in the 12 years tracked, about 5 weeks apart.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 11 percent on value. It is cheaper than 77 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 76 percent. Among the games that feel like it, TowerFall Ascension ($14.99, scores 83) beats it on value, while it beats Kero Blaster ($9.99, scores 63).
Steam's global achievement data says about 5 percent of players ever finish it. On a 3-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. Inside the two-hour refund window, 82 percent of the 476 reviews written there were positive, against 88 percent overall, and those are 44 percent of everything written about it.
The main story runs 3 hours. Doing everything runs 9, 2.9 times as long.
At 3 hours it is a handheld-sized game, and Valve rates it Deck Verified.
The drop-off
9% start to 5% finishMost players never reach the end. On a 3-hour game, that's a lot you pay for and may never use. Steam global achievements
What players say
Fly around and swing your mace trying to hit blocky asteroids and enemies, that's it.
In 2024, no. It's like a budget Geometry Wars, but you don't shoot. Your ship has a tail that you whip around to hit targets. You have to use the inertia of your ship to get the tail in motion. Resorting to quick direction changes and spinning in circles is what works best. Sounds like a refreshing idea, but it quickly gets boring as there is next to no variety. So many better choices out there these days.
Swinging 🍜 & meatballs at high velocity incurs damage to poorly built triangle ships and polygonal asteroids
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
PARTICLE MACE scores 73/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/295690/particle-maceThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 20, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.