IndependANT

a cute little collectathon-style platformer. very short, but free. some steam achievements would be a nice addition but besides that I have no major issues with his game.

It's a short and free tech demo. Nothing really wrong with it, but nothing that good about it either. It's just, meh.

"IndependANT" is a short (less than 30 minute) tech demo game... basically you're an ant and your ant farm home was destroyed so you have to help out your colony. What do you do in the game? It's mostly third person platforming with a bit of item collection stuff. Frankly if this had more content, slightly better graphics and a lot more polish it could have been a whopping commercial success... but the brevity of the game plus the way it's rough around the edges and more of a demo than a serious game development endeavour makes me feel like this is a wasted opportunity for success. The graphics in this game are passable, but could be better. And while it's vital for any game to have impressive visuals (gaming is a visual medium, after all), there's more to a game than just the graphics. To be worth a gamers time, the game must match top tier visuals with top tier gameplay, and that's not happening here. As mentioned the game is really, really short.. sure, it's free, but it's also not worth your time. If you have a really bad internet connection you might even spend more time downloading this than playing it. See how that's a problem? On the matter of pricing and value for gamers, most "free" games on Steam aren't really free. There's often nasty mobile app cash shops, or content locked behind DLC, or donations being requested, or any other number of shady pricing schemes that could mislead gamers, but in this case I'm glad to say this really does appear to be a fully free game. Nothing demonstrates a developers belief in themselves and their work than giving it away without any remuneration. This is a service to themselves, and the gaming industry, and should be applauded. Of course, just because something is free, doesn't necessarily mean it's valuable, or something you might want to spend your time on. Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 13 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? This is a "maybe" experience... if you have a lot of free time on your hands and nothing else to do, why not? But for the purposes of a review, this isn't something I can say everyone must try. It's not quite there. Valve doesn't give us a "maybe" option in reviews, but if they did, that's what I'd choose for this.