"Circuit Slinger" is one of literally thousands of student projects infesting Steam. It's from the Methodists at the SMU Guildhall in Texas, USA. While student projects tend to be better quality than most "amateur" made games, we must still question what value such projects have for gamers. As with all student projects, this isn't really a fully fleshed out game, it's just the result of an academic exercise, and as such it has much more limited value as a game than a professionally developed game would have.
Educational institutions should not be using Steam as a dumping ground for homework assignments (especially if the students didn't even pass the course). Sure, it helps their marketing and helps the students feel good about themselves, but this is another case of a business putting themselves before the needs of gamers.
The students fell into a rather sad trap that ensares some more ambitious amateur developers, and that is the philosophy that any game at all is made better if you hold it down and bolt Dance Dance Revolution mechanics onto it while it's twitching and screaming. That's right, the students took a simple VR first person shooter (VR exclusive of course, because, err... VR makes everything better and you can just make anything VR compatible then all other quality considerations can be ignored). Then they bolted QTE/rhythm mechanics onto it, making the FPS annoying and unenjoyable.
The moral of the story? If you're a developer and you think making every game into a Guitar Hero hybrid is a good idea, now would be a pretty good time to go back to your day job. But be sure to throw your PC out the window first, in service to the gaming industry. It is bad when developers try to make everything into a rhythm game.
In terms of visuals, this features fairly low quality low poly 3D graphics which will deter a lot of gamers, understandably. Worse, they tried to cover up for the lazy low poly art with ugly neon/minimalist skinning on it, making a bad situation into an awful one.
Gaming is a visual medium, and while some developers struggle with creating high quality visuals, failing to do so is a disservice to gamers. It's very difficult to recommend bad looking games.
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.
You're forced to sign a highly questionable yet legally unenforceable End User License Agreement... for such a relatively low effort, low quality product, this comes across more as a delusion of grandeur than anything else. This agreement includes questionable requirements that may attempt to revoke consumer law protections that gamers expect to have, which is also highly problematic. Developers must learn they are here to serve gamers, not control them. I had my cat walk over the keyboard while the EULA was displaying, which fixed that problem for me.
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.
Now on to pricing and value 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. So much for the matter of pricing.
In terms of public reception, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at just a dozen or so concurrent players, and now there's basically nobody playing it. Even though it's free. This is a dismal public reception, but it's easy to see why gamers rejected it.
Given that this free title won't increase your game collector count, is it worth your time to add it to your library?
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.
