"BATTLE THUNDER FRONT 《战雷前线》" is a completely awful Chinese turn based strategy game... and that's being generous. This is more of a text based spreadsheet... more dumbed down than a football club manager. Of course the subject isn't a sports team, but the Vietnam War... not that you could really tell much. This is just text.
What do you do in the game? Click on various things in the text interface to pit soldiers against enemy soldiers and see who wins by reading the text. No graphics. From a game made in 2022. What a joke.
For gameplay purposes, because the user interface for this game is mostly just 2D static text/images... it might as well be a web page. It's functionally no different from a browser game. And we all know, Steam isn't here to compete with Chrome and Firefox. If the game can be done in a web browser, it's just not rich or compelling enough to appeal to serious gamers on PC.
The graphics here are particularly awful, it's just text, the laziest kind of copout any "amateur" developer could bother when phoning in a game, so bad that it actually stands out as one of the worst looking games on Steam. Quite an accomplishment.
It's a big contributor to the failure of the game to attract gamers despite having no up-front cost. Gaming is a primarily visual medium, and if developers want to succeed, they must understand that it's not an area for compromise.
On the important matter of pricing and value for gamers, there's a lot going on here with monetisation, so this really shouldn't be considered a truly free product because of that.
There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $16 USD for this.
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.
Even after that, you're expected to pay up $1 USD to unlock content through DLC purchases. The game should not be considered completely unlocked until you empty your wallet for the developer. This is misleading and predatory pricing on a product falsely marketed as "free".
The poor quality of this game is also reflected by how many people bothered playing it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the game all-time peak player count was only ONE person. That's right, only one person ever played this at a time. When I tried this for the purposes of reviewing it, I equalled the peak player count for the game. OUCH.
The only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it.
Considering there's over 130 million gamers on Steam and well over 140,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
Since free games don't contribute to your game collector badge and other profile stuff, is this a worthwhile addition to your Steam library?
I think you should give this one a miss. Although it's free, your time and storage are valuable resources, and the market is filled with superior options.
