[b][quote][url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_flip]Warning: Asset Flip![/url][/quote][/b]Employee Recycling Center is a Digital Homicide style asset flip, or what Valve calls a "Fake Game". The "developer" paid for/pirated a few Unity asset store packs, dumped them all in a blender, and submitted it to Valve as if they're real game developers.
Two notable criteria for what makes an asset flip instead of legitimate use of stock assets are whether those assets comprise the majority of the game, and whether the "developer" properly credited the people who created most of the assets in the game. This game fails both of those tests. The "developers" here didn't credit any of the artists and real, actual game developers who created the assets here, so this is plagiarism, as well as cash grab shovelware.
This asset flip is just a very short VR focused physics puzzle adventure, with only about 5-10 puzzles in it, so you can speedrun this in about 5 minutes. It's just minimum viable product dumped onto Steam by an asset flipper to try scam gamers.
Idea Cabin have a known history of trying to scam people into paying them money for someone else's work, through this account or through closely linked/alt accounts. One example of Idea Cabin doing this is [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/705300]Suicide Adventures[/url], which is really the "[url=https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/dungeons/dungeon-s-explorer-kit-39788]Dungeons Explorer Kit[/url]" asset, written by the actual developers, Aquarius Max.
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.
There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
The game features lazy low-polygon "retro" assets, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the 1990s. 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.
Bewilderingly, the game doesn't include proper audio controls, so you can't turn off the annoying background music, you'll need to alt+tab out and stop the music using the Windows sound mixer. This is obviously not okay and it's unclear why the developers chose not to include this basic feature.
The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
This was designed primarily for VR (but it will work without a headset, not that anyone would want to try). The VR focus of the game is a major crutch here, because without VR, this compares poorly to professionally developed games. Developers must learn that while VR is great, if the only thing that makes the game great is the VR, then the game isn't great at all.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
Employee Recycling Center 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 starting this crap game, trivial to get, but less than 16 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.
Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, and isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 16 percent of players bothered playing the game for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this game to have so many concurrent players who didn't bother engaging with this game? Trading cards. People will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game.
That tells us people only really bought this game for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.
One of the driving elements of this shovelware game is "achievement spam", that is to say the game features a ridiculously large number of trivial/automatically granted achievements, 500 of them, in fact. It's a damning indictment for this shovelware that people only bought it for easy achievements, and not because it has any serious merit as a real game.
Employee Recycling Center has the ridiculous price of around $4 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the unethical nature of the developer. Remember that if you buy a game from an unethical developer, you're putting your money at risk. This is also competing with over 9,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
