Blight's Grasp

Needless to say if an educational institution taught me incorrectly on purpose, I'd ask for my money back. "Blight's Grasp" is a student project from Southern Arkansas University (SAU) Game Lab that ignores that 3D graphics became mainstream in the mid 1990's... there's no such thing as a gaming PC without 3D graphics. The faculty at Southern Arkansas University (SAU) Game Lab apparently didn't feel it necessary to tell students about that. It's going to be tough for any student to go find work in the industry if they can't even show they know about 3D video games. The students made a cartoony/cel shaded third person console-tier brawler game with a gimmick that you change your available attacks based on the "elements" you find. Plotwise it's nothing interesting, low effort sci-fi pulp about an alien planet and a missing sister and a cure for the corrupted world, but the gameplay and the plot seem somewhat divorced from each other. It might make the students feel good about themselves to get this published on Steam Direct (even if no gamers actually wanted it), but this has no benefit for us PC gamers. We have to question the value of institutions flooding the store with low quality 2D video game homework assignments while gamers wade through this stuff to find professionally made 3D games. This looks a lot like it was designed for consoles, but released on Steam instead by mistake. While this is on PC, it has all the hallmarks and deficiencies of a console game, from the clunkier than needed control scheme to the less than cutting edge graphics. There's 10's of thousands of PC games on Steam, and PC gamers deserve only the best. This might not appeal to many gamers due to the lack of PC-centric design. It's unclear why this never made it to the video game console appliances it seems to have been designed for. On the important subject of visuals, this features fairly low quality stylised/cartoony low poly 3D graphics. It comes across as the kind of thing you see on mobile phones and Nintendo games, which will deter a lot of PC gamers, understandably. Gaming is a visual medium, and to be considered one of the best games on Steam, the graphics have to be some of the best on Steam. That's not happening here. Insultingly, the developer insists that you should play this with a console peasant children's toy gamepad instead of KB+M. Developers should try to be aware which platform they're designing games for. It's the responsibility of the developer to ensure the game runs well on the platform they're selling it on, with the primary peripherals that PC gamers use. Next is pricing and what value this has for gamers. It would be unethical for students to try charge money for their homework assignments, so you don't have to pay any money for this. But you'd still have to spend your time downloading this, and "time is money", as they say. There's the other problem, too... as a student project, this wasn't made for gamers. There's no requirement for them to polish and balance the game properly, all they need is something to show the faculty so they can get their grade and move on. Let's once more ask... why is that good for gamers? It's obviously not delivering a solid product. Yet here it is, on the store page, and here you are, reading my review for a student demo that's going to waste your time. While genuine amateur developers who made real products get ignored because they have to compete with this stuff. In some ways, this deluge of student projects on Steam is harmful to everyone. A peak of [b]8 concurrent players[/b] (according to SteamDB) for a "free" game is a disastrous public reception. Out of 130 million potential players here on Steam, almost nobody was interested. Even though this is "free". That level of rejection speaks a lot for the quality of the game. This isn't a complete game for gamers, just a glorified homework assignment, and there's no profile benefits like a +1 count to your game collector badge, so I can't recommend adding it to your library.