Disaster Area is a pre-Alpha level low poly combat proof of concept that was quickly dumped onto Steam as a cash grab. It's barely, if at all functional in the current state it's in, and of course it's been abandoned. Certainly, it seemed to be a little ambitious, and of course the ambition was utterly unmatched by the developers who decided it would be okay to try to scam gamers for barely functional garbage with no apparent intention to finish the game. But they wanted your money. And they still do, seriously, I'm here writing a review for this, mostly just to warn gamers again not to give unethical developers money they don't deserve, because you certainly wouldn't recieve anything of any value if you bought this.
The game was abandoned roughly 6 months after launch and hasn't been updated in 8 months. It blew past the developers commitment to complete the game without any notification or admission of failure from the developer. The game will never be completed.
The game features lazy low-polygon "retro" assets, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the mid 2000s. It's unclear why the developers weren't able to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets for the game, and also irrelevant... what matters is that this looks bad as a result of their decisions, a compromise PC gamers shouldn't have to put up with.
The game itself, as mentioned, is a barebones alpha with no serious playable content.
Disaster Area didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the game, either. It has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game didn't really capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for playing enough to go up a level, trivial to get, but less than 29 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. Hardly a success story, gamers just weren't all that interested in the game.
The poor quality of this game is also reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 9 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
Another unethical act of this developer, knowing full well that this game is abandoned and they will never complete it, they are deliberately trying to scam gamers into buying it by offering it on discount and selling keys to the game from third party key resellers. It's impossible to "accidentally" discount a game. The developer looked at their abandoned game, and instead of doing the right thing and removing it from Steam, they instead doubled-down and tried to scam even more people into paying for it. Greedy, and completely unethical. Doing the wrong thing, on purpose, for money. This is not okay.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
Disaster Area has the total ripoff price of around $7 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the unethical nature of the developer.
For comparison, the $7 asking price for this game could get you games like "Ark: Survival Evolved", "The Witcher 2" or "Total War Shogun II". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.
[quote][b][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/b]
Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.[/quote]
