Filthy Hands is an abandoned Early Access PvP FPS game with a limited premise... it's 3v1, and in the event there were ever 4 players playing the game (won't ever happen again), one player chooses an armed robber and the other three take on the role of unarmed defenders (but you can pick up melee weapons). The attacker has 5 minutes to steal a safe and leave the map, the defenders must stop the attacker (who has a gun, hence the 3v1 odds).
The game was abandoned less than a month after launch and hasn't been updated in over 2 years. It blew past the developers commitment to complete the game without any notification or admission of failure from the developer. The game will never be completed. The developer kept all money taken from gamers.
The focus of the game is pure PvP, there's no single player content. The developer gambled that other players would be an acceptable substitute for adding storytelling, level design etc to the game. The vast majority of PvP-only games fail because they don't "go viral", and without players, or single player content to add a lasting value to the game, the game dies. Developers must learn that other players are not an acceptable substitute for adding content to a game.It failed. SteamDB shows the game hit all-time peak player numbers just after launch, with only a tiny 14 concurrent users, which is a pitiful number, and now the game has practically no players, nobody playing at all, just a one or two people logging on every week or so then quickly deleting the game when they see how bad it is. Why did it fail? It's video game autopsy time!
The developers made the terrible mistake of launching a multiplayer only game in Early Access. This is almost certain to kill the game. Most gamers will evaluate a game only once. If they do so when the game is incomplete, they will check it out, then abandon it (just like the developers did). When (IF) the game eventually does get around to release, there will be no players, because the developers burned the first impressions through their faulty Early Access experience. Players who saw the game and didn't like it because it was incomplete [i]do not come back[/i]. Multiplayer games must have a large population if they are to go "viral" and succeed, especially without single player content to fall back on. Releasing a multiplayer only game into early access kills the game population, and thus the game, before the game even launches.
The developers made the fatal, lazy mistake of believing that PvP, other players, would be an acceptable substitute for doing the difficult job of adding single player level design, storytelling, NPCs and other rich aspects of designed game content to the game. As a result of this choice by the developers, the game has little to no actual interactive game content. It's a little considered fact that the vast majority of PvP only, multiplayer only games [b]fail[/b]. Developers must learn that other players are not an acceptable substitute for doing the job of game developers and building a game filled with content. PvP only games must have a [b]huge[/b] player base for them to "go viral" and succeed. But with no single player experience to add lasting value to a game, the developers instead chose to bet against all odds that their game would "go viral" without any actual reason for players to want to play the game. Predictably, they lost this bet.
Also contributing to the failure here, from a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
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.
One of the important quality checks for any video game is the audio. The bare minimum of audio controls must be there, so the experience can be tailored. The audio and music must be of high quality. Bizarrely, Filthy Hands doesn't even have any music at all. That's an immediately failure and yet another reason to avoid this game.
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.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
You're forced to sign a highly questionable yet legally unenforceable End User License Agreement... for such a relatively low effort, low quality $Type this comes across more as a delusion of grandeur than anything else. This agreement includes questionable requirements that may attempt to revoke consumer law protections that gamers expect to have, which is also highly problematic. Developers must learn they are here to serve gamers, not control them. I had my cat walk over the keyboard while the EULA was displaying, which fixed that problem for me.
Unethically, the developer sold keys to this abandoned Early Access game into cheap, nasty game bundles, where they knew it would be advertised and sold as a complete PC game. This seems to have been done in an attempt to mislead gamers into buying a knowingly faulty, defective and incomplete product. When a developer does this for a game they have zero practical intention of completing, this is essentially a scam, an intention to get paid for a broken/unfinished product. Often this is done as an exit strategy, as the developer takes the money and runs. No refunds have been given, the developer kept all the money they took from gamers.
Futhering the unethical actions of the developer, the game contains stock/store assets, but the "developer" here hasn't credited the people who actually did the work for the game. In some cases this breaches the license agreement the developer signed for the use of those assets. Worse, some of the assets (from Freesounds) are licensed under a [b]NON-COMMERCIAL AGREEMENT[/b], but the developer is violating those licenses [b]FOR PROFIT[/b]. This is not just a contractual/license breach, in many jurisdictions this is a breach of criminal law. Claiming credit for the work of others as well as breaching intellectual property licenses for profit is highly unethical.
Filthy Hands still carries the scam price of $4 USD despite being abandoned and unplayable. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, the abandoned nature of the game and the unethical nature of the developer (as outlined above), this is impossible to recommend.
