"Halfway Down" is one of literally thousands of retro 2D platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere... and I'm not kidding. Searching for "platformers" on the Steam store page yields over 17,000 results! Is this one of the best of those? Absolutely not.
This is possibly one of the worst precision platformers ever made, and the sheer failure this had on Steam is a factual testament to that. I don't think it was the bad gameplay, lack of polish or anything else of that sort that killed this before it even started. The graphics were obviously phoned in, and that's gamer repellant.
Platforming is an old, mostly dead genre, and this lacklustre experience, while it doesn't have an upfront cost, isn't saving the genre... it's no surprise this failed to capture any attention from gamers in the era of immersive 3D gaming.
The graphics here are particularly awful, while not directly pixelcrap, aren't far from it, minimalist, lazy, zero effort stuff, so bad that it actually stands out as one of the worst looking games on Steam. Quite an accomplishment.
It's a big contributor to the failure of the game to attract gamers despite having no up-front cost. Gaming is a primarily visual medium, and if developers want to succeed, they must understand that it's not an area for compromise.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
This is "free" enough (not every "free" game in the "free" section is truly free, there's usually some hidden price tag), at least you won't be expected to spend any more money after you download this, but just because something is free doesn't mean it's good, and the cost of a game is more than just financial, your time is valuable too.
In terms of public reception, this failed. There's over 130 million unique gamers visiting Steam every month. SteamDB showed the game peaked at [b]only 4 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
Given that this free title won't increase your game collector count, is it worth your time to add it to your library?
Not this time. This isn't worth downloading. While this won't cost you any money, you get what you pay for, and sometimes, even when the game is free, it's still not enough.
