"CAEDES" is just a low key asset flip.. the quality of the assets is significantly higher than the actual game is, and that's a glaring mismatch. Who's going to create a bunch of (almost) high quality assets and then phone in the actual game? It doesn't add up... unless you consider how easy it is for anyone, even people unqualified to make games, to get any and all the game assets they want.
The game is essentially a kitbash of assets made by other people, poorly assembled by an amateur developer. These projects are usually rushed through Steam Direct as fast as possible, and the lack of professional standards means the end result is something no gamer should waste their time on.
This is a laughably bad asset kitbash, a few assets dumped on a first person shooter blueprint... at least they didn't try to make this an empty PvP arena, but the bots are garbage, just like the assets. This was a dismal failure on Steam Direct... if you're looking for Rainbow 6 before Ubisoft turned it into a crap ripoff of Call of Duty, this isn't it.
So, the game might look better than you'd expect from an amateur project, but this is because it's partially or completely made up of stock assets, "borrowed" from asset stores and free asset websites. Very little in this game is truly the creation of the "developer", it's just a bunch of rearranged assets.
While there's no up front price for this asset flip, the other problem with asset flips is that when developers aren't capable of doing their job and creating high quality assets, we quickly find they can't do any of the rest of the job of a game developer either. That's definitely true for "CAEDES".
It's VR exclusive, and that shows the developer failed to understand the most basic axiom of VR game design... if the only cool thing about your product is VR support, your product is not cool.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $10 USD for this... trying to get YOUR money for other people's game assets.
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.
Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB shows this peaked at [b]only 5 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
This "free" game won't count toward your game collection count on your profile. With that in mind, is it something you should still download?
Not this time. This isn't worth downloading. While this won't cost you any money, you get what you pay for, and sometimes, even when the game is free, it's still not enough.
