"Eclipse --- Defending the motherland" is just a low key asset flip.. the quality of the sometimes mismatched looking assets is suspiciously much higher than the actual game is, and that's a glaring mismatch. Who's going to create a bunch of high quality assets and then phone in the actual game? It doesn't add up... unless you consider how easy it is for anyone, even people unqualified to make games, to get any and all the game assets they want. The game is essentially a kitbash of assets made by other people, poorly assembled by an amateur developer. These projects are usually rushed through Steam Direct as fast as possible, and the lack of professional standards means the end result is something no gamer should waste their time on.
a weird, sad Unity kitbash from China, a bunch of assets rearranged to make a very basic first person wave survival VR shooter. This is barely more than a tech demo, and what it demonstrates is bad... a barely playable, clunky mess. And that was in 2016... now, it's even more dated and clunky. Avoid.
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.
It's VR exclusive, and that shows the developer failed to understand the most basic axiom of VR game design... if the only cool thing about your product is VR support, your product is not cool.
This game is ancient, it's over 10 years old... it's heavily dated and isn't going to give you a remotely contemporary gaming experience... another reason for gamers to be hesitant about adding this to their libraries.
Now onto pricing and value.
This is "free" enough (not every "free" game in the "free" section is truly free, there's usually some hidden price tag), at least you won't be expected to spend any more money after you download this, but just because something is free doesn't mean it's good, and the cost of a game is more than just financial, your time is valuable too.
You can always judge a game by how popular it is with the general public. Steam has over 130 million unique gamers, and over 40 million unique logons every day from dedicated PC gamers. But this only ever had a peak player count of a dozen or so people... that's very poor public reception. Gamers rejected this, most likely due to the reasons I supply in this review.
Since free games don't contribute to your game collector badge and other profile stuff, is this a worthwhile addition to your Steam library?
Not on a bet. This might be "free", but I still feel like I got ripped off.
