From University of Houston, we have "Hullbreakers." Students here were clearly mistaught that it's fine to release obsolete 2D games in the 3D era. 3D graphics cards became uniquitous in every single gaming PC ever since the 1990's when the ATI Rage and Voodoo3 hit the scene. Any professional development business that sees a prospective hire who doesn't know 3D graphics became mainstream in the mid 1990's with the Voodoo3 and ATI Rage probably isn't going to give them a job. Bad for the students, and what is this delivering for us gamers in the 3D gaming era?
There's not much to say about this one, apparently UoH aren't aware of stuff like copyright or creative bankruptcy and instructed the students that gamers expect 2D retrocrap and don't want game like GTA:V anymore, and also it's okay to just rip off other people's entire games (in this case Geometry Wars). Obviously this results in nothing of any importance to the most important people in the gaming industry: Gamers.
When institutions flood the store with low quality 2D video game homework assignments, we have to question what value they have for gamers. They're not fully fledged games, they don't even have 3D graphics. It might make the students feel good about themselves to get this published on Steam Direct, but gamers have to wade through this stuff just to find the professionally made, fully fleshed out 3D games we really want.
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.
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.
Now onto pricing and value.
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]4 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. I suspect the players were either the students or the faculty getting ready with their big stamp that says "F" on it.
This student project/tech demo/glorified homework assignment provides no Steam profile benefits, no +1 to your game count, and little value to gamers (because it's just a small, unpolished student project), so I can't recommend this over the thousands of full, professionally made games on Steam.
