From Digipen, we have "Flatline." Students here were clearly mistaught that it's fine to release obsolete 2D games in the 3D era. 3D graphics cards became uniquitous in every single gaming PC ever since the 1990's when the ATI Rage and Voodoo3 hit the scene. Any professional development business that sees a prospective hire who doesn't know 3D graphics became mainstream in the mid 1990's with the Voodoo3 and ATI Rage probably isn't going to give them a job. Bad for the students, and what is this delivering for us gamers in the 3D gaming era?
The students got told, as a deliberate joke, that in 2021, PC gamers only want to play 2D retro pixelcrapesque platformer garbage. Seriously, Digipen took a bunch of money off a lot of students and then said this is what video games are like, and taught the students to make this one. A directionless, badly animated platformer with a "Cyberpunk" theme.
What I want to know is how Digipen found game dev students who had never seen video games before and never thought to question it when Digipen told them that Nvidia and AMD were fictional businesses and there's no such thing as a "3D graphics card", and also that Wolfenstein 3D is also not real and no, they never played it because it's just a conspiracy to try to prevent game developers from making 2D games, which are the only games that exist.
I don't know what's going on here, but I do know this student project really is a 2D retrocrap platformer that was published in 2021 alongside Metro Exodus and Hitman 3.
We also have to question what value there is for gamers on Steam when institutions flood the store with low quality 2D video game homework assignments... sure, it might make the students feel good about themselves, but this has no benefit for gamers who have to wade through this stuff to find professionally made 3D games.
This game is fairly dated at 5 years old... and even back then it looked old and busted compared to contemporary, professionally made 3D games of the same period. It looked bad then, it looks worse now.
Now onto pricing and value.
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 3 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
Keep in mind this student project won't increase your game collector count or show up in your Steam profile showcases, and because it's a short, unpolished and unmaintained student homework assignment, I can't recommend you spend your valuable time on this one when you could be playing any of the thousands of fully made games for gamers.
At the end of the day, my reviews are intended to help gamers find quality and avoid the dregs (with over 140,000 games on Steam... not all of them are masterpieces). If you think my review is wrong, definitely add this to your library, download it and play it... it's surely exactly the kind of game you'll love (but I doubt it will work out that way). Game reviews are for gamers to share their thoughts and help others choose where to spend valuable time. If my review helps you to grab or reject this game, then my job is done.
