Bits at Work

⠀

[h1] Manage your pixel crew and get bongos. Hire new square blocks to work and essentially build simplified office with PC workstations and some enhancements. Change decoration. Buy new stuff, raise salary and level up your workers. Little management game with simple yet working game mechanic. It's ok for what it is but don't expect much and if you're more into action games you will feel disappointed. [/h1]

"Bits at Work" is a poorly made and unambitious tycoon game with a fairly short progression ramp and not a huge amount of lasting interest. The objective of the game, as with all tycoon games, is to build up an environment and make it profitable... in this case a rather small and pointless pixel office. This features really godawful, lazy pixelcrap "art" instead of real graphics. It's hard to say if this was because the developer didn't have the skill to do the job of creating 3D visuals, or couldn't afford to hire someone who does, but it also doesn't matter. What matters is that this looks bad because of that decision, and that's a major deterrent to gamers. Games like Terraria and Stardew Valley succeeded [i]despite[/i] the bad graphics, not because of them. Not every "free" game really is. There's often MTX, or content locked behind DLC, or donations being requested, or any other number of things that could mislead gamers, but in this case I'm glad to say this really does appear to be a fully free game. Nothing demonstrates a developers belief in themselves and their work than giving it away without any remuneration. This is a service to themselves, and the gaming industry, and should be applauded. Of course, just because something is free, doesn't necessarily mean it's valuable. Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 12 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. 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? This is a "maybe" experience... if you have a lot of free time on your hands and nothing else to do, why not? But for the purposes of a review, this isn't something I can say everyone must try. It's not quite there. Valve doesn't give us a "maybe" option in reviews, but if they did, that's what I'd choose for this.