"Box Ninja" is one of literally thousands of retro 2D platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere... and I'm not kidding. Searching for "platformers" on the Steam store page yields over 17,000 results! Is this one of the best of those? Absolutely not.
When a platformer is this low in quality I'm either going to say it's a joke game or just a tech demo from someone trying to see how Steam Direct works (and this happens a lot, people really do spend $100 to dump garbage onto Steam purely to see whether or not it works). But there's 30 levels of very bad platformer here, beneath mediocrity. That's a lot of work that went into something nobody wanted or asked for, but that's the wonder of Steam Direct, I guess.
Platforming is an old, mostly dead genre, and this lacklustre experience, while it doesn't have an upfront cost, isn't saving the genre... it's no surprise this failed to capture any attention from gamers in the era of immersive 3D gaming.
In order for a platformer to be even remotely successful, it needs to be incredibly exceptional compared to even modern games... it can be done, look at Hollow Knight for example... but this is no Hollow Knight. It's not even remotely close. It's a pixelated disaster about ninjas and boxes. The levels are tiny, uninteresting, the graphics truly some of the worst. Really.
The graphics here are particularly awful, 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.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
This is "free" enough (not every "free" game in the "free" section is truly free, there's usually some hidden price tag), at least you won't be expected to spend any more money after you download this, but just because something is free doesn't mean it's good, and the cost of a game is more than just financial, your time is valuable too.
In terms of public reception, this failed. There's over 130 million unique gamers visiting Steam every month. SteamDB showed the game peaked at [b]only 3 concurrent players[/b]... 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? What's the verdict?
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.
