Green Steel is an unabashed, lazy ripoff of Battle City (Copyright Namco, 1985). Many lazy "amateur" developers don't pay attention to their obligations under copyright law, and often steal the ideas of actual, real game developers without credit, such as the "developer" here has done.
Putting aside the unethical intellectual, creative and moral bankruptcy of stealing someone else's game concept, this is also breaking that unwritten law of stealing other people's game ideas... you should at least try to do better than the game you're ripping off. Green Steel is considerably worse than Battle City.
What do you do in the game? It's Battle City only with no players and somehow even worse graphics than a 1985 arcade machine could do. Can you imagine being a game developer and thinking "It's 2021, the year of Halo Infinite, so obviously what the gaming industry needs is a crap ripoff of a 40 year old game. I will charge money for it".
Yeah, a lot of things went wrong here and resulted in someone burning $100 to publish garbage on Steam Direct.
So this looks like an old 1990's Adobe Flash game that you might play in a web browser, and the problem there is obviously Steam wasn't intended to try compete with Chrome and Firefox. If it can be done in a web browser, it's not even close to a cutting edge PC gaming experience. That's a problem.
This game features very lacklustre minimalist "art" for graphics instead of anything remotely contemporary. I'm sure the "developer" thought this would come across as "artistic", but it doesn't, it comes across as "really lazy". Yes, contemporary 3D graphics take a lot of time and effort to create. That doesn't mean it's okay not to bother! Developers must try to understand that gaming is a visual medium, and gamers spend a lot of money on high end gaming rigs for a reason. And that reason is not so they can look at lazy, phoned-in half efforts like this.
This wasn't designed for typical widescreen monitors, it's locked to a deprecated 4:3 aspect ratio. It won't look right on modern PCs as a result of this bizarre decision to publish a PC game that doesn't conform to the standard display form factors.
It's free... now, but it wasn't before. The developer was charging $3 USD for this.
Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It's a nice gesture for the game to be given away for free, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product. It's also a bit of a slap in the face to anyone who paid money for this... nobody got refunded.
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?
Nope. This isn't worth downloading. There's no financial cost up-front, but you'd still be spending your time and a little hard drive space on a product that's far from the best. There's thousands of better alternatives on Steam.
