"Cyndefense 2" is a poorly made, extremely generic tower defense game where you use a bunch of pixel blobs to defend a pixel blob against waves of pixel blobs. It's a buggy mess, and the gameplay is of even worse quality than the visuals. At least it's genuinely, if badly made.
The game is really simple and unambitious in terms of implementation, more of a tech demo or one of those cases where an amateur developer spends $100 to publish something on Steam Direct to see if it's possible. Yes, obviously it's possible. A proof of concept, tech demo, or something that's less than a little blip on the radar isn't offering anything truly valuable to gamers.
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.
It's free... now, but it wasn't before. The developer was charging $5 USD for this.
Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It's a nice gesture for the game to be given away for free, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product. It's also a bit of a slap in the face to anyone who paid money for this... nobody got refunded.
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?
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.
[quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Response![/url][/quote]The developer has weighed in to inform everyone they didn't read the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Usage Rules[/url] for Steam "partners", or they deliberately ignored the part 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 first thing the developer wants everyone to know is that they are "The Main Character". You, as a gamer, don't matter. They breach Valve guidelines for developers just to complain about a fully accurate and informative review (with facts their ego doesn't like). It's evident from their attitude that they never created this product with gamers in mind. They did so to stroke their own ego. When developers, especially failed ones who would never be able to get a professional job in the industry, put themselves before gamers, we end up with garbage products like this. That explains how this trash ended up on Steam, but it doesn't excuse it. At least we finally got to meet The Main Character, and nobody else matters.
The developer admits they didn't hire a team of talented staff to produce the game and tried to do the whole thing on their own, instead. This is a lot like boarding an airplane, and halfway through the flight, having the pilot come out and serve peanuts. It's going to end in disaster. It requires a team of competent people to do a complex job properly, and that's not what has happened here... another explanation for the poor quality of this game.
The developer chooses to attack the review by failing to acknowledge the real reason they used crap pixel "art" instead of doing their job properly and arranging contemporary visuals. We all know if they were capable of doing better, they would. Pixelcrap is always explained by terrible developers as an "artistic" decision... we know for a fact if they could make a game with visuals like Hellblade 2 or Black Myth Wukong, they would! But they didn't, because they can't, because they're not good enough. But they have the gall to describe their incompetence as "art". This is an insult, a pathetic inadequacy that should not be a problem for gamers to have to put up with. Developers like this give genuine amateur devs a bad name.
The developer at least has enough self awareness to identify this garbage as inadequate and a failure (the facts already prove that, but many awful developers deny them). However, instead of removing this from Steam, they left it here in a deliberate attempt to pollute and worsen Steam with garbage, an edifice to their own ego and direct proof that so many amateur developers simply don't give a crap about what's good for gamers or the gaming industry. It's just "ME! ME! ME!" with these guys, and the developer breach clearly shows it.
Nothing in the developers pointless breach of Valve guidelines changes any of the objective facts of my review. My review stands unaltered. I cannot recommend this garbage to anyone.
