Interloper

A ingeniously made game reminds me of the first time I played something like starcraft or chess, it is perfectly designed. Has balanced games which are quick and complex. Can't believe this game never caught on with mainstream steam multiplayer games. 9.5/10 Great game design.

good game

[quote][b]Note: Dead PvP game[/b] This game contains no meaningful single player content. There are no available servers and no player population. This game cannot be played as intended.[/quote] You play an online real-time strategy game that is meant to be short and fast-paced, lasting only a few minutes. The goal is to control the map by cornering your opponent rather than destroying them. The game's story is not detailed, but the game is presented as an "accessible" strategy experience. The minimum system requirements are quite low, suggesting a simple visual style. This is basically a 2D video game ripoff of the old pen and paper game "Dots and Boxes", which is a lot of fun if you're bored in school, and absolutely not fun in a video game format, which is why this is a dead PvP game with no players. Sure, capturing squares works differently, but it's still all about taking over all the squares on a grid. Like if you took a generic PvP game and removed the "shooting" part because who likes shooting in video games? Almost everyone? Oh. So, Interloper is a dead PvP game. Why did it fail? It's video game autopsy time! [i]Almost every PvP exclusive game on Steam fails.[/i] Only a tiny proportion of them "go viral". This game failed for many of the same reasons those others fail. The chief of which is the developer thinking that their game will "go viral" without actually creating any reason for it do so. Competition amongst PvP centric games is extreme, and there's only a finite player base to appeal to. This game failed to reach any kind of critical mass and died as a result. Let's go into some of the reasons this particular game failed to appeal to gamers, despite the zero up front cost. First and foremost, there's no meaningful single player content. The developer gambled that other players would be an acceptable substitute for adding storytelling, level design etc to the software. They lost that bet. Without a huge community of players or single player content to add a lasting value to the game, the game dies. Developers must learn that other players are not an acceptable substitute for adding content to a game. The game features really lacklustre 2D visuals (does the developer not know 3D graphics became mainstream in the mid-1990s?). Gamers don't spend thousands of dollars on gaming rigs and the latest 3D graphics cards to play 2D games. Even mobile phones and game consoles can do 3D graphics now. There's no excuse. It's free... now, but it wasn't before. The developer was charging an insane $12 USD for this. Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It's a nice gesture for the game to be given away for free, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product. It's also a bit of a slap in the face to anyone who paid money for this... nobody got refunded. 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, it's dead. Note: As a previously paid game of poor quality, the game still has a remarkably high peak player count. This is not because at some point the game was popular, but rather, because there's trading cards. So the player count is just a product of people idling the game to get trading cards. The high player count on the game should not be taken as an indicator of quality or popular public reception.