Cruel Galaxy: Discordia

"Cruel Galaxy: Discordia" is an old school turn based strategy space ship simulator where you control a spaceship and make decisions and engage in combat while managing your starship systems, a bit like a slightly better conceived FTL game but with worse implementation. It's not free, it's donationware/beggarware. The game topic includes "despair" and I agree, the quality of the game was so bad I fell into despair. For gameplay purposes, because the user interface for this game is mostly just 2D static text/images, menus and a simple browser like UI... it might as well be a web page. It's functionally no different from a browser game. And we all know, Steam isn't here to compete with Chrome and Firefox. If the game can be done in a web browser, it's just not rich or compelling enough to appeal to serious gamers on PC. On the topic of visuals, the weak looking 2D retro assets seem like they'd be more at home in a browser game or a mobile app. 3D graphics accelerators hit the mainstream of PC gaming in the mid 1990's with cards like the ATI Rage and Voodoo3D, there's no excuse for such poor 2D graphics in 2025. That alone is enough to disqualify this for recommendation. 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. Now on to pricing and value for gamers. They have their hand out for a $5 USD "donation" for this as you're expected to give them money from buying empty DLC from Steam... digital panhandling. Like the homeless guys who splash dirty water on your windscreen at the traffic lights. No thanks. 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. Since free games don't contribute to your game collector badge and other profile stuff, is this a worthwhile addition to your Steam 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.