"Edemn" is an abandoned Early Access playerless PvP shooter with a "skeleton" theme that doesn't make a lot of sense, but then again this is just another nasty Russian (edit: Ukrainian) cash grab scam on Steam.
Despite being unable to finish the game, the Russian (edit: Ukrainian) dev apparently had all the time in the world to dump an eye watering TWENTY TWO bucks worth of P2W DLC on the Steam store. Day 1 DLC is never okay. And when it's P2W DLC? Cancer. No wonder this failed.
This is a PVP only game with no players (because it's garbage), intending to be a weak Quake Arena ripoff, it just died because, well, it's terrible, and the developer is shady as.
The developers abandoned this 1 year and 2 months ago. It will never be completed. This unfinished game is just polluting Steam and making it harder for gamers to find genuinely, completely made games.
This has some really mediocre looking graphics that will understandably be a turn off for a lot of gamers, and it's a big contributor to the failure of the game to attract gamers despite having no up-front cost. Gaming is a primarily visual medium, and if developers want to succeed, they must understand that it's not an area for compromise. You deserve better than compromises.
On pricing and value for gamers, as mentioned this isn't really free as the game is infested with mobile app store like microtransactions. This is a consumer hostile model that we don't need to see on PC. It's deceptively priced to gouge gamers, and that's a reason in itself to avoid this.
Even after that, this is only free in a rudimentary sense... the developer has their hand out for $22 USD worth of "donation" DLC for this as you're expected to buy some extra DLC packages from Steam... digital panhandling. Like the homeless guys who splash dirty water on your windscreen at the traffic lights. No thanks.
Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at just a dozen or so concurrent players, and now there's basically nobody playing it. Even though it's free. This is a dismal public reception, but it's easy to see why gamers rejected it.
It's important to note that, despite this being such a low quality product, there's a number of positive reviews that all appeared immediately after the game launched, from suspiciously inactive Steam accounts that have reviewed almost no other games apart from this. Take the review score of this game with a grain of salt.
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?
Nope. This isn't worth downloading. While this didn't cost me any money up front, I still feel ripped off.
[quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Response![/url][/quote]The developer has weighed in to inform everyone they didn't read the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Usage Rules[/url] for Steam "partners", or they deliberately ignored the part where Valve says:
[quote]Though it may be tempting, not every review needs to be responded to. A developer response will frequently draw more attention than the original statement, potentially turning a small issue into a much larger community discussion. It's also not a good idea to use this feature to refute customer opinions. Your direct attention can be seen as validation or a defensive attempt to silence your customers.[/quote]
The developer unwisely corrects me while at the same time making his country look worse... but it's true, cash grab scams come from more than just Russia, Brazil and China. We can now add Ukraine to the list of countries full of developers who try to scam PC gamers with garbage like this. Well done.
The developer falsely accuses me of being "left wing" biased... I've always been adamant that politics has no place in gaming (and you can see the motivations of anyone, including this developer, who try to inject politics into games or discussion around games... it's always, always motivated around their own greed and self importance). As such my reviews are and must always remain politically neutral.
The developer falsely accuses me of being biased against "indie" developers, this is once more not true. I am, however, biased against badly made games and unethical developers who push asset flip scams onto the gaming industry... like the developer here is doing, which is morally and intellectually bankrupt. If indie devs have a bad name, it's because of shady Ukrainian and Russian developers like this. It's not hard to do the right thing... it takes considerable effort to do the wrong thing, on purpose, as the developer here has chosen to do.
There is, however, a correlation between indie developers and low quality products. Well, sherlock, that's because they're not professionals and could never get a job in the industry. Who knew amateur games aren't as good as professionally made games. But I don't cause this correlation, I just observe it over thousands of reviews of unprofessionally made amateur products. With price tags on them. And my findings and observations correlate to the views of millions of other gamers... these games are always failures for the reasons I explain.
Ultimately it doesn't matter if GTA:V was made by one guy in a shed over the space of a weekend and Depression Quest took 1000 staff working for 5 years to make, what matters is the resultant quality of the product. You can see the intellectual dishonesty of the developer made apparent from their comments.
Nothing in the developers pointless breach of Valve guidelines changes any of the most critical facts of my review. My review stands unaltered. I cannot recommend this game to anyone.
