[quote][b]Note: Dead PvP game[/b]
This game contains no meaningful single player content. There's no viably populated servers/active player population. This game cannot be played as intended.[/quote]
"Cat Warfare" is not a complete game. It's an advertisement/demo, and you have to pay more money through DLC to unlock the full game (mostly cosmetics). What do you get if you let the deceptive and shady marketing win and pay the DLC toll?
This is one of those things where you first look at the game and say "okay, this is just an asset flip looking PvP arena with cats, a weak Unreal Tournament ripoff", but when you look deeper, it gets uglier the more stones you turn over. And ugly, this is.
First and foremost, as I will hammer home, this is not free. The developers removed the initial price and all features from the game and locked them behind a DLC that you have to buy to unlock the full game. This is deceptive practice intended to mislead gamers. Misleading gamers for profit is wrong.
The purpose of this advertisement is to get you to shell out $5 USD to unlock content for the full game, and I don't recommend you do that.
What do you do in the game? Nothing. There are no players and no bots; it's just an empty dead game.
This game is fairly dated at 5 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 important matter of pricing and value for gamers, there's a lot going on with monetisation, so this shouldn't be considered a truly free product.
There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $5 USD for this.
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 the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product. This is also a slap in the face to anyone who showed enough questionable judgement to pay money for this... nobody got refunded.
As an advertisement, this is only free in the same way that adverts on YouTube are. This is a game demo dumped on Steam to advertise another store page in the hopes of raking in cash. Just because advertisements are free doesn't mean they're worth your time.
It's important to understand there's a formal process to create a demo/page for a game which wasn't followed here:
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/demos
While it might seem like an innocuous mistake, publishing demos and advertisements as full games is misleading and harmful. This ad is taking up marketing space and visibility that would be better made available to a developer who created a full game. Instead, that visibility is given to a demo/advert published incorrectly, polluting the marketplace.
It's unclear if this was incompetence or a deliberate intent to mislead. Developers may incorrectly publish demos as separate games to bypass paying Valve for marketing presence, which may seem clever to them, but it's harmful behaviour and not good for gamers.
To summarize pricing, this used to cost $5 USD, it now costs $5 USD through content unlock [b]and[/b] the developer is panhandling for another $4 USD "donation" for the soundtrack. The grift never ends.
In terms of public reception, this failed. Steam has over 130 million gamers. SteamDB showed the game peaked at less than 100 concurrent players—it couldn't even break three figures—and now basically nobody is playing. Even though it's now "free" (but not really). This is a dismal reception, but it's easy to see why gamers rejected it.
Advertisements and incorrectly published demos don't add +1 to your game collector count; they aren't full games. It's impossible for me to recommend this incorrectly published advertising spam. You deserve better.
[quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Response![/url][/quote]The developer weighed in, proving they didn't read the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Usage Rules[/url] for Steam "partners", or they deliberately ignored where Valve says:
[quote]Though it may be tempting, not every review needs to be responded to. A developer response will frequently draw more attention than the original statement, potentially turning a small issue into a much larger community discussion. It's also not a good idea to use this feature to refute customer opinions. Your direct attention can be seen as validation or a defensive attempt to silence your customers.[/quote]
The developer's response is misleading and inappropriate. There's a reason Valve has these guidelines which the developer of this disaster gleefully breaches.
Take this lie-riddled, dishonest developer tantrum in the context of this being a completely failed, dead, playerless PvP game. This isn't my opinion; the player counts on SteamDB are there for all to see. This is an abject failure from an incompetent and dishonest developer.
The developer starts with a LIE: that this game is both "complete" and yet "being worked on" (both can't be true, and I suggest both are lies), and that the DLC you need to buy to unlock the full game doesn't exist because there is nothing to unlock. [b]So why does the paid DLC exist if the developer was telling the truth?![/b] The developer has immediately doubled down on their intention to mislead and scam gamers, which my review appropriately warns about.
Here are some facts the "developer" of this scamware is desperate to hide. The last update was a token one [b]6 months ago[/b] (an update for no players!). The developer spends more time on game trailers than actually developing the game; the update history is free for all to see on SteamDB. Why the developer seeks to lie and mislead gamers is obvious, as this is a non-free for-profit product with content locked behind a DLC that wouldn't exist if they were truthful.
The developer lies about player counts (a flat line is not "fluctuation") and functionality; you cannot play a PvP game with only one player. More dishonesty and lies from this shady dev.
The developer demands that because this garbage is inferior to AAA games, it must therefore only get positive reviews, because it is on the same platform. What an absolutely disgusting, arrogant take.
The developer demands this is not an asset flip... I just said it looks like one. Given the developer now reveals direct dishonesty through this breach of guidelines, we should assess this closer as it increases the chances of further unethical behaviour. The second problem with asset flips is their quality sucks... and this is indistinguishable from an asset flip in quality... a surefire reason why this failed.
Finally, the developer of this train wreck [b]demands[/b] my review instruct them on how to make video games, because they obviously don't know, looking at this dismal failure of a product.
There is no obligation for reviews to be constructive. Reviews are not written to teach developers how to make games. They should know this before they release products on Steam. If they don't, why is this a problem for gamers?
[b]Video game reviews are to inform gamers on their decisions around which games to buy, download, or spend their time playing.[/b] In this case, gamers had already made the decision to reject this disaster from a toxic developer.
Nothing in the developer's pointless breach of Valve guidelines changes the objective facts of my review. My review stands unaltered, with a minor clarification about the locked content. I cannot recommend this failed scam to anyone.
