Dan's Odyssey

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"Dan's Odyssey" is a very poorly made amateur 3D rendered 2D top down shooter. I don't think it's an asset flip because, well, the assets don't look good enough to have been created by a professional asset creator. So hey, at least this is genuinely and sincerely made. What do you do in the game? You do some top down twin stick style shooting in somewhat low quality 3D environments, there's a little upgrade/progression system... trust me when I say I've seen several thousand games on Steam that are much worse than this. But at the same time this is unpolished and it just doesn't reach out and grab attention. Or interest... twin stick shooting is a thing for console peasants, and such games never do well on Steam. The game revolves around score attack instead of narrative, and the godawful soundtrack is also a huge deterrent for gamers. And why are the enemies just "shapes"? The graphics in this game are passable, but could be better. And while it's vital for any game to have impressive visuals (gaming is a visual medium, after all), there's more to a game than just the graphics. To be worth a gamers time, the game must match top tier visuals with top tier gameplay, and that's not happening here. 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. It's free... now, but it wasn't before. The developer was charging an eye watering $9 USD for this. Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure (I think that is the most likely explanation here). 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. Even though this is "free", it 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.