"HordeFighter 2D" is an unabashed, lazy and abandoned ripoff of Vampire Surivors (copyright Poncle, 2023). The developer in this case had the great idea of creating a brand new game concept by stealing Poncle's design, art style and mechanics down to the letter, but then gave up and walked away when it turns out nobody wanted Vampire Survivors from Temu.
What's the game about? HordeFighter 2D is a free-to-play, single-player, 2D action roguelike game. You face waves of enemies and complete tasks to uncover hidden areas. As you defeat enemies, you collect souls to unlock permanent upgrades, helping you survive longer in subsequent runs. The game, set in a post-apocalyptic world, features pixel graphics and is currently in Early Access.
The developers abandoned this 1 year and 1 month ago. It will never be completed. This unfinished game is just polluting Steam and making it harder for gamers to find genuinely, completely made games.
This features really godawful pixelcrap "art" instead of real graphics. It's hard to say if this was because the developer didn't have the skill to do the job of creating 3D visuals, or couldn't afford to hire someone who does, but it also doesn't matter. What matters is that this looks much worse than most other games because of that decision, and that's a major deterrent to gamers. Games like Terraria and Stardew Valley succeeded [i]despite[/i] the bad graphics, not because of them.
The developer chose not to do the job of a real game developer and create meaningful bespoke levels, narrative based gameplay progression and so on. Instead, they decided that "Procgen IS content!" and lazily tried to use procgen algorithms to create infinite, samey, repetitive, soulless levels, because that's a lot less work.
As a result of this poor decision, the game gets tired and repetitive almost immediately. Developers must learn that procgen is a terrible substitute for creating real content. It should not be used as "ez-mode" for content creation, as the developer tried to do here.
This is "free" enough, 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.
Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 3 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. While this didn't cost me any money up front, I still feel ripped off.
