Echo Rift

A fantastic and extraordinarily challenging rhythm game. Intuitive controls, excellent music, and cute style. Absolutely recommend it. For being in early access and a student game, I was surprised by how polished it is.

"Echo Rift" is just another student project dumped onto the Steam store, one of thousands. It's from University of Utah in Utah. While student projects tend to be better quality than most "amateur" games, we must still question what value they have for gamers. This isn't a fully fleshed out game. It's the result of an academic exercise and has much more limited value than a professionally developed game. Educational institutions should not be using Steam as a dumping ground for homework assignments. It helps their marketing and makes students feel good, but it puts the business before the needs of gamers. The students made a Dance Dance Revolution ripoff where you control a furry living in a dystopian world (because it's got furries in it) and you hear sounds other furries don't (which means you should see a doctor or a vet or whatever) so you have to dance to music other people can't hear. Seriously don't they lock you up for that? Anyway it's a rather lame rhythm/QTE game that failed hard on Steam Direct because the students didn't bother finishing the game and just walked away from it after they got their grades. The "developers" walked away from this 9 months ago. This is never getting finished. This unfinished game is just polluting the store and making it harder for people to find real, actually finished games. This isn't good for gamers or for developers who do the right thing. On the important subject of visuals, this features fairly low quality stylised/cartoony low poly 3D graphics. It comes across as the kind of thing you see on mobile phones and Nintendo games, which will deter a lot of PC gamers, understandably. Gaming is a visual medium, and to be considered one of the best games on Steam, the graphics have to be some of the best on Steam. That's not happening here. Let's talk about price and the value this represents for us gamers. It would be unethical for students to try charge money for their homework assignments, so you don't have to pay any money for this. But you'd still have to spend your time downloading this, and "time is money", as they say. There's the other problem, too... as a student project, this wasn't made for gamers. There's no requirement for them to polish and balance the game properly, all they need is something to show the faculty so they can get their grade and move on. Let's once more ask... why is that good for gamers? It's obviously not delivering a solid product. Yet here it is, on the store page, and here you are, reading my review for a student demo that's going to waste your time. While genuine amateur developers who made real products get ignored because they have to compete with this stuff. In some ways, this deluge of student projects on Steam is harmful to everyone. Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB shows this peaked at [b]only 8 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. Given that this free student project won't count toward your game collection or add any achievements, and because it's not really a full game and more of a homework assignment, it's not a worthwhile download.