[quote][url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_slop][b]Warning: AI Slop[/b][/url]
This game's voice acting is talentless, soulless AI generated content.[/quote]
Drive Beyond Horizons is an unusual Unreal kitbash... certainly the argument could be made that this is an asset flip. The vast majority of the game assets are plagiarized... stock assets are intended to be used as placeholders, tutorials, guides. They're not supposed to be a substitute for real game development, and no game should be entirely made of other people's assets... especially not with a price tag on it.
The premise is novel and the only reason this went anywhere. It's a zombie apocalypse game (yeah, asset flipped zombies) where you build and maintain a car and drive along an endless road to see how far you can get, stopping at various asset flipped gas stations to scavenge food and materials to keep your asset kitbashed car going.
Really, the premise works, and if such a game was made ethically with this premise, with real work going into polished, custom assets and mechanics, the developer would be printing money. Instead, of course, we've got this ugly kitbash.
It's not even a complete game... this is deep in development hell, it's only getting token updates, and there's no reason to believe the developer will finish this, let alone replace all the plagiarized assets with genuine ones.
So the visuals might look halfway decent at first glance, if mismatched looking in places. But that's only because the "developer" is using other people's assets. When a dev is too lazy or untalented to make their own art, they usually aren't capable of competent coding or game design either. That is exactly the case with this mess.
Taking this shovelware seriously as if it was a genuine attempt to make a game, it doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The game assets are fairly mediocre/low quality which fits with the idea they weren't developed by the game creator... they look like they're "just reasonable enough" to go on sale as part of an asset pack. The issue of asset flipping aside, ultimately the quality of these assets is low and low quality always makes for a less than optimal gaming experience.
The game assets, such as they are, are much higher than the general quality of the game and it seems apparent the developer has just plagiarised/kitbashed them. Stock assets are just there to be used as placeholders while the developer creates their own assets for their games, but what happens far more often is lazy/unethical developers just throw a bunch of other peoples assets into a blender and put their own name on the horrible Frankenstein's Monster that results. Like this mess.
As mentioned, this features really godawful, "wrong" looking AI slop instead of genuinely and sincerely created game assets. It's hard to say if this was because the developer didn't have the skill to do the job of creating real game assets or couldn't afford to hire someone who does, but it also doesn't matter. What matters is that this looks bad because of that decision. AI slop sticks out like a sore thumb... and it comes across as insulting.
There's also the old adage that those who lack the budget and talent to make their own game assets usually lack the budget and talent to do the rest of the job of game development properly, too, and that's glaringly obvious here.
These technical shortcomings push this game below minimum standards for any competently developed modern PC game.
This kind of asset flipping isn't harmless. It makes it harder for gamers to find genuinely made games from ethical developers. It makes it harder for genuine indie developers, who put hard work into trying to make real games, to find an audience for their products. It gives indie developers a bad name.
On to pricing and the question of value. Should you buy this asset flip? Is this one of the best of the 140,000+ products on Steam? Absolutely not.
Drive Beyond Horizons has the preposterous price of $25 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games.
For comparison, the $25 asking price for this game could get you games like "Day-Z", "Cyberpunk 2077" or "Crusader Kings III". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this. Hell, you can get Pacific Drive for less than this, and that's a genuinely made game. Buy that instead.
The use of AI slop is a direct insult to gamers and real, ethical content creators and artists everywhere.
