"Broken Metal" is kinda like if you took X-Com, removed the cool sinister UFO conspiracy theme, removed the base building, replaced all the graphics with pixelcrap of the lowest order, and stripped out anything else that might be fun, too. What you're left with is a turn based tactical with zero joy and quality so bad you'll wonder if PC gaming was worth it at all.
What do you do in the game? Plod through samey procgen encounters endlessly. That's it, that's all there is to it. Surviving units get to upgrade their skills.
This features really godawful 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 much worse than most other games 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.
There's also no UI scaling, so if you have a smaller monitor you're screwed and probably can't play this, and if you have a larger display, well the characters are going to be wall high. Developers need to test their games on a variety of hardware if they want to be taken seriously. If they just want to fail as hard as this did, on the other hand, sure, testing is optional.
This game is fairly dated at 6 years old... and even back then it looked old and busted compared to contemporary, professionally made 3D games of the same period. It looked bad then, it looks worse now.
On the matter of pricing and value for gamers, most "free" games on Steam aren't really free. There's often nasty mobile app cash shops, or content locked behind DLC, or donations being requested, or any other number of shady pricing schemes 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, or something you might want to spend your time on.
Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 2 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?
Nope. This isn't worth downloading. There's no financial cost up-front, but you'd still be spending your time and a little hard drive space on a product that's far from the best. There's thousands of better alternatives on Steam.
