"Gobbo's Gambit" is one of literally thousands of student projects infesting Steam. Rather than being from a formal educational institution, this is a community effort from GameDev in Singapore, a collection of amateur and professional developers who work on evangelizing and incubating the domestic game development industry in Singapore.
So, student projects might look better than amateur shovelware, but they aren't real games. This is just a glorified homework assignment. It lacks the depth and value you get from professionally developed product because it was made for a grade, not for players.
That plays out here with Gobbo's Gambit, a short, unpolished "minimum viable product" that clearly was very educational for the GameDevSG community, but isn't delivering a valuable product to gamers at all. It's a third person action platformer where you control a goblin, obviously, but it's janky, unpolished, lacks content and lacks QOL features too.
The game lacks options for adjusting resolution, which means you can't ensure the game runs at your display's native resolution. This design choice may cause the visuals to appear less than optimal on just about every modern LCD/OLED display.
The lack of customizable controls is a significant drawback. This decision makes the game potentially unplayable for gamers with physical disabilities, left-handed players, or those using non-QWERTY keyboard layouts like AZERTY.
The graphics in this game are passable, but could be better. And while it's vital for any game to have impressive visuals (gaming is a visual medium, after all), there's more to a game than just the graphics. To be worth a gamers time, the game must match top tier visuals with top tier gameplay, and that's not happening here.
So much for the technical implementation, 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.
Even as a free game, this couldn't find an audience. With a peak of [b]only 3 players[/b], it's clear the Steam community took one look and walked away. They literally couldn't pay people to spend time playing this.
Since this is more of a student tech demo than a full, genuinely made game for gamers, and offers no Steam features, like a +1 to your game count, I can't recommend downloading this over a full, professionally made game, of which there are thousands here on Steam.
