"GO! GO! Beetle Roller!" is one of literally thousands of student projects infesting Steam. It's from Eastern Michigan University in the USA. While student projects tend to be better quality than most "amateur" made games, we must still question what value such projects have for gamers. As with all student projects, this isn't really a fully fleshed out game, it's just the result of an academic exercise, and as such it has much more limited value as a game than a professionally developed game would have.
Educational institutions should not be using Steam as a dumping ground for homework assignments (especially if the students didn't even pass the course). Sure, it helps their marketing and helps the students feel good about themselves, but this is another case of a business putting themselves before the needs of gamers.
This is a quirky 3D action platformer, focusing on collecting orbs to enhance a ball gadget. The story involves a superhero, Beetle Roller, trapped in a digital world, needing your help to escape, which involves rolling a ball on various platforms, running into enemies to blat them... ultimately the game does work, it's kind of a "maybe" experience. Student projects are never really made with gamers in mind.
On the important subject of visuals, this features fairly low quality stylised/cartoony low poly 3D graphics. It comes across as the kind of thing you see on mobile phones and Nintendo games, which will deter a lot of PC gamers, understandably. Gaming is a visual medium, and to be considered one of the best games on Steam, the graphics have to be some of the best on Steam. That's not happening here.
Here's a real problem though... even though this is a student project that probably should never have been published alongside sincerely, professionally made games, the students have gotten a bit greedy and are trying to get PAID for a student project... they're panhandling for a $2 USD donation for the soundtrack. This is utterly unacceptable, and you have to wonder what kind of college they came from that thinks this is remotely okay for students to be doing.
Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 4 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
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?
Absolutely not... SteamDB doesn't lie about this being a failure, and it's obvious why. See the developer breach below to better understand "how".
[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 first thing the developer wants everyone to know is that they are "The Main Character". You, as a gamer, don't matter. They breach Valve guidelines for developers just to complain about a fully accurate and informative review (with facts their ego doesn't like). It's evident from their attitude that they never created this product with gamers in mind. They did so to stroke their own ego. When developers, especially failed ones who would never be able to get a professional job in the industry, put themselves before gamers, we end up with garbage products like this. That explains how this trash ended up on Steam, but it doesn't excuse it. At least we finally got to meet THE MAIN CHARACTER.
The developer complains that while this review closely addresses serious problems with this product, it resembles other reviews I have written for other products that share the exact same problems and deficiencies. There's over 140,000 games on Steam. Hundreds, in some cases thousands of these games share the same defects which gamers should know about before wasting any time on those products.
However, the "developer" of this failed product arrogantly [b]DEMANDS[/b] that I find completely unique ways to describe [i]the exact same defects[/i]. What a completely ignorant, arrogant demand from a demonstrably failed developer. The developer demonstrates thier appalling attitude here. It's a sheer insult to gamers everywhere.
If I used completely different language to describe the same defects, [i]this product would still suffer from the same defects[/i]. Changing the wording of my review would not make this product better.
The developer quickly tries to distance himself from the educational instution he's defamed just by publishing this garbage in their name (and trying to monetise a student project, this is simply grotesque). You can see why... it's clear the institution would not approve of any of this garbage behaviour from an objectively failed developer.
The developer complains about the truth... they deliberately set out to mislead gamers by publishing software as if it was free, but then they stapled paid DLC onto it. Worse, this DLC doesn't contain any content worth mentioning. This is absolutely beggarware, digital panhandling, and the developer is now angry that someone pointed out the way they're stand on the street corner with a hand lettered cardboard sign is absolutely an attempt to get paid for putting low quality garbage on Steam. Yet another sign we're dealing with someone with serious "Main Character Syndrome".
The developer tries to arrogantly justify his begging on Steam because he throws a few pennies at the composer (apparently). What is this? A demonstrably failed developer trying to monetise Steam like it's Spotify? This is absolutely disgusting.
You can see from the developers incredibly arrogant, misleading and easily disproven claims in this breach of developer guidelines that they're completely full of themselves, and as I pointed out very clearly, this was done completely without gamers in mind. As always, when developers put themselves before gamers, we get this kind of garbage.
Nothing in the developers pointless breach of Valve guidelines changes any of the objective facts of my review. The core facts of review stand unaltered, although I have removed the "maybe" suggestion... gamers should not be involved with products from disgustingly arrogant, failed developers abusing the "free" section of Steam for profit and panhandling. I cannot recommend this failed student project to anyone.
Edit: The developer can't stop digging this hole.
The developer acknowledges this is a student project!! I already said that.
The developer admits this is a for-profit student project by charging money for it through DLC!
Why the developer continues to lie and contradict himself in the face of undeniable evidence is unclear, but this guy is THE MAIN CHARACTER so never considers, well, anything but himself.
Folks, this is what you should expect from students from Eastern Michigan University. Disgraceful, isn't it?
