Idle Sphere

[quote][b][url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtransaction]Warning: In-Game Cash Shop[/url][/b] This game is infested with a toxic mobile app style cash shop. You will be prompted to and expected to give money/credit card details to the developers through this cash shop to buy in-game goods so you can play the game.[/quote] [i]Idle Sphere[/i] is a brainless clicker/incrementer... you know the type, click on stuff to make numbers go up so you can buy stuff to help you click on stuff to make numbers go up so you can buy stuff to... you get the idea. The brainless gameplay is, unsurprisingly, accompanied with an equally low quality technical implementation and poor presentation, resulting in yet another horribly low quality shovelware game that might as well have been done in a web browser. At first I thought this was just another "banana", but in some ways it's worse... toxic monetisation infests every aspect of this garbage except for Steam Marketplace NFTs. I guess the developer was going to introduce those next. Anyway, this is broken, achievements don't work, and the toxic cash shop is everywhere in this glorified clicker/screensaver. This truly is cancerous scamware. Like... they couldn't finish the game but they had all the time in the world to add in-game cash shops, paid DLC, microtransactions... it's a disgusting attempt to scam gamers. They didn't even bother to try call it rain. The developers abandoned this 1 year 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. Despite not being able to finish the game, the developers apparently had all the time in the world to build that fully functional cash shop, and financial transaction back-end system into the game. That shows the developers primary goal was just to set out to gouge cash from Steam gamers just like mobile devs do with mobile peasants. 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. 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. This game is infested with mobile app store like microtransactions. This is a consumer hostile model that we don't need to see on PC. It's deceptively priced to gouge gamers, and that's a reason in itself to avoid this. Even after that, you're expected to pay up $35 USD to unlock content through DLC purchases. The game should not be considered completely unlocked until you empty your wallet for the developer. This is misleading and predatory pricing on a product falsely marketed as "free". 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. I didn't have to pay for this, but I still feel like I got scammed.