Gravitrix

This is yet another student project, one of literally thousands self-published on Steam Direct. It's from Carnegie Mellon University in the USA. This is the result of an academic exercise for students. It's not a full, complete game in the way professionally developed products are. While it has more quality than most amateur games, it's not a complete gaming experience. Student projects have limited value for gamers because they're not fully developed games, just barely functional demos that show the students progress. Steam is not a place for for-profit colleges to dump student homework assignments... and having thousands of these is not good for gamers. Just like it says on the box, this is a console-esque third person 3D platformer with a pogo stick mechanic that has you bouncing around between urban themed platforms... and yet it plays even worse than the early 1990's Commander Keen games. Controls are quite janky and unpleasant, it doesn't play well at all. In terms of visuals, this features fairly low quality low poly 3D graphics which will deter a lot of gamers, understandably. The garish neon backdrops make the visuals cluttered and even uglier. Gaming is a visual medium, and while some developers struggle with creating high quality visuals, failing to do so is a disservice to gamers. It's very difficult to recommend bad looking games. Insultingly, the developer insists that you should play this with a console peasant children's toy gamepad instead of KB+M. You cannot play this without a console peasant children's toy. Developers should try to be aware which platform they're designing games for. It's the responsibility of the developer to ensure the game runs well on the platform they're selling it on, with the primary peripherals that PC gamers use. Let's look at the price and what kind of value this actually offers gamers. 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. A peak of [b]3 concurrent players[/b] (according to SteamDB) for a "free" game is a disastrous public reception. Out of 130 million potential players here on Steam, almost nobody was interested. Even though this is "free". That level of rejection speaks a lot for the quality of the game. 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.