Heroes Of Avranche

"Heroes Of Avranche" is a "solo dev" ripoff of Diablo 2 with what looks like game art assets ripped off from World of Warcraft. Almost weird how Blizzard never stepped in on this one because it's blatant. And, as always with bad things, there's symmetry because the developer took a bunch of people's money then broke his promise under Steam's Early Access to actually deliver a game... as always, buyer beware. What do you do in the game? It's a janky pre-alpha... very little of the game works, and when you try to play it, it's worse than Diablo 2 from Temu. It seems this was abandoned by the devs 3 years and 3 months ago. This game will stay incomplete forever. These unfinished, abandoned game attempts just clog the storefront and make it difficult for players to find honest, fully developed games. This game looks a lot better visually than the actual gameplay. It could be the developer purchased high-end assets (no proof of that), or somehow managed to create great-looking assets while delivering a mediocre game, in this case it could be either... but there's no hard proof this is an asset flip. But as always, ethics of asset flipping aside (whether this is one or not), what matters is the quality of the game, and this has all the same low qualities that we expect from asset flip shovelware. This game is fairly dated at 7 years old... and even back then it looked old and busted compared to contemporary, professionally made 3D games of the same period. It looked bad then, it looks worse now. On the important matter of pricing and value for gamers, there's a lot going on here with monetisation, so this really shouldn't be considered a truly free product because of that. There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $20 USD for this. Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It seems like a nice gesture for the game to have no up-front cost anymore, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product. This is also a bit of a slap in the face to anyone who showed enough questionable judgement to pay money for this... nobody got refunded. So this is now "free", but it's abandoned. Worse, it was never intended to be free. The developer intended to charge for this if it ever left Early Access... but the developer just couldn't be bothered. Making this abandoned pollution that gamers need to filter through when searching for products made by more ethical developers who fulfill their promise to deliver on their Early Access commitment instead of breaking that promise. Despite being a "free" game, this couldn't break triple figures, according to the player counts we can see on SteamDB, it's just in the double digits, and now it's not even getting those kinds of numbers. There's over 130 million gamers on Steam... this failed to appeal to almost all of them, most likely because of some or all of the reasons I supply in this review. 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? What's the verdict? No way. This is just impossible to recommend. I didn't spend any money on this, but I still feel like I got scammed.