A War of a Madman's Making

Political sims are rare and this is good as far as indie visual novel political sims go, especially free ones. My only quibble is that the art style is a bit ugly, but you'll be doing more reading than looking at the graphics anyways.

A War of a Madman's Making is not a game, it's an e-book that's been dumped on Steam masquerading as a game. As a visual/interactive novel, this doesn't feature any notable gameplay, it's just a lot of clicking through badly written dialogue that would never have been accepted or published in print, which poses the question, "How did something this badly written end up on Steam?". When someone hoping to become an author is unable to get published in print, they spend $100 and dump their high school fan-fiction onto Steam, under the guise of a game. Usually Steam e-books are a product of the high school anime club kicking a fan-fiction writer out, leaving them with no recourse but to publish their fan-fictions about their waifus on Steam. Today, I guess it was the student politics council kicking someone out? This is a pretend politics Choose Your Own Adventure e-book slapped together with the Ren'Py construction kit. But, the universe loves constants... the writing from this failed author is so bad it makes those anime fan-fictions look like New York Times bestsellers. Visual novels/e-books are tedious at best... imagine the best novel you ever read, be that Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy or 2001: A Space Odyssey or Twilight (if you have terrible taste in literature), but then translate that to a format where the words dribble out and you have to click your mouse every time you wanted to read the next sentence, instead of just turning the pages. You'd think it was garbage. Now imagine that experience, but with much worse writing (because if these guys could write professionally, they'd be published authors and this would be on shelves in bookstores, and they wouldn't have to pay Valve $100 to self-publish this on Steam), and you have your average Steam e-book. One of the chief problems with failed authors polluting Steam with non-game E-books is that E-books can easily just be presented in a web browser... there's no justification for charging money on Steam for what might as well be a webpage. We don't spend thousands on buying a gaming rig to spend money on Steam for something Chrome or Firefox could do. Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the e-book peaked at only 11 concurrent readers... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. The funny thing is, if you wanted to print this book, you'd only need to print 11 copies to satsify the entire world's demand for it. While this E-book is "free", you can get better quality, professionally written books and comics for free online (from places like Project Gutenberg) or from public libraries. Steam isn't a comic book store, neither is it Netflix, it's for games. Your gaming rig is not a Kindle. It's impossible for me to recommend things to PC gamers that aren't really games. [quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Response![/url][/quote]The developer has weighed in to inform everyone they didn't read the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Usage Rules[/url] for Steam "partners", or they deliberately ignored the part where Valve says: [quote]Though it may be tempting, not every review needs to be responded to. A developer response will frequently draw more attention than the original statement, potentially turning a small issue into a much larger community discussion. It's also not a good idea to use this feature to refute customer opinions. Your direct attention can be seen as validation or a defensive attempt to silence your customers.[/quote] The developer complains that while this review closely addresses serious problems with this product, it resembles other reviews I have written for other products that share the exact same problems and deficiencies. There's over 120,000 games on Steam. Hundreds, in some cases thousands of these games share the same defects which gamers should know about before wasting any time on those products. However, the "developer" of this failed product arrogantly [b]DEMANDS[/b] that I find completely unique ways to describe [i]the exact same defects[/i]. What a completely ignorant, arrogant demand from a demonstrably failed developer. The developer demonstrates thier apalling attitude here. It's a sheer insult to gamers everywhere. If I used completely different language to describe the same defects, [i]this product would still suffer from the same defects[/i]. Changing the wording of my review would not make this product better. The developer deliberately and wilfully ignores the sections of my review that pertain to the specific defects in this garbage e-book, particularly the exceedingly awful high school dropout tier fan-fiction writing, complete garbage. Remember, this crap only ever had 11 concurrent readers who didn't even bother finishing the crap e-book, that's how bad this is. The developer tries desperately to fling shade at this review to do anything but avoid facing the cold, hard reality... he's a failed author, who couldn't get published, who dumped a fan-fiction on Steam as if it was a game, got ignored by everyone on Steam, and is now breaching Valve guidelines to whine that someone pointed the facts out. That certainly explains how such a garbage e-book got dumped on Steam as if it was a game, but it doesn't excuse it. Nothing in the developers pointless breach of Valve guidelines changes any of the objective facts of my review. My review stands unaltered. I cannot recommend this badly written e-book to anyone.