[quote][b][url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_flip]Warning: Asset Flip![/url][/b]
"Apocalypse Secrets" is one of literally thousands of creatively bankrupt asset flips/kitbashes infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere.[/quote]
This is basically a failed Russian asset flip/cash grab scam, from fake paid reviews to stolen Unity assets and a stupidly inflated price point. It's unclear why the Russian scammers behind this scheme gave up and made this free, but clearly they abandoned their effort to try profit from it.
Regardless, the other reason apart from ethics that causes gamers to hate asset flips is because these are fake games, not fully fleshed out PC gaming experience, just minimum viable products. This is a stupidly shallow hidden object clicker where you click on stuff in a scene made up of assets the developer plagiarised off the Unity Asset Store. It's not a real game.
So, "Apocalypse Secrets" is partially or completely made up of stock assets, "borrowed" from asset stores and free asset websites. Little, if anything in this game is the creation of the "developer".
There's no initial download price for this, but that doesn't mean it's worth it given the asset flip nature of this shovelware. When developers can't do their job properly and instead plagiarise the work of others, usually they also lack the technical skills to handle coding, optimization, or game design, or any of the other things real, competent game developers do. "Apocalypse Secrets" is proof of that. It's garbage.
There is no English support here, but it isn't necessary. The language of bad games is universal.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $60 USD for this... this kind of pricing is often used by Russian asset flip scammers to "protect" the false positive review score on a fake game (after all, they paid a lot of roubles for those fake reviews). It can also be highly priced for the contributarily criminal activity of laundering money through Steam... buy hundreds of copies of a fake game with stolen credit cards or whatever, and then extract the money from the developer account. Sure, Valve takes a cut, but 30% isn't a huge price rate for money laundering. No evidence, that's just another possible explanation for the scam tier pricing on a product everyone knows is garbage.
Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It seems like a nice gesture for the game to have no up-front cost anymore, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product. This is also a bit of a slap in the face to anyone who showed enough questionable judgement to pay money for this... nobody got refunded.
Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB shows this peaked at [b]only 5 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
[quote][b][url=https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/federal-register-notices/16-cfr-part-465-trade-regulation-rule-use-consumer-reviews-testimonials-final-rule]Warning: Review Manipulation![/url][/b]
This product features a number of fake positive reviews from accounts known to be in the business of review manipulation/paid reviews. They're all written in either Russian or broken English, appear at almost exactly the same time, very shortly after the product launched on Steam, and the accounts are used consistently to write fake reviews for asset flips and other cash grabs/scams. The "Positive" review score on this should be disregarded due to this blatant, unethical review manipulation. This is done to deceive and scam gamers into paying for a bad product.
Due to the 2024 FTC ruling, these fake reviews are a violation of US Federal Law ([i]16 CFR § 465.2, 15 U.S.C. § 45[/i])[/quote]
Bearing in mind that free games don't add +1 to your game collector count, should you bother adding this to your library and downloading it?
I can't recommend this. I didn't have to pay for this, but I still feel ripped off.
Finally, I write these reviews to try help people navigate the thousands of games on Steam so they don't waste time on low quality products. There's over 140,000 games on Steam... Steam Direct is allowing an influx of around 40-50 new games [i]every day![/i]. If you think I'm wrong about this one, go ahead and add it to your library, download it, install it, play it and see for yourself. Maybe you'll come to agree with me after wasting your time. Either way, consider writing your own reviews too. I'm just glad if my review helps give gamers enough info to make a better informed choice.
