Just the Boss Fights

Steam is drowning in thousands of lazy, low-effort 2D platformers, and "Just the Boss Fights" is yet another one. I'm not kidding, there's over 17,000 platformers on Steam, almost all of them are garbage, amateur kitbashes. This is not one of the good ones. This platformer seems to have specifically aimed to be worse than most platformers... by design, almost all of the platformer mechanics and level negotiation has been removed completely, in exchange it's just a bunch of single screen "boss fights" of deplorably low quality. So this is a platformer, but worse! This is a tired, outdated experience from a tired, outdated and obsolete game genre. Just a couple of platformers out of literally thousands have any appeal for gamers lately (Super Meat Boy, Hollow Knight etc). This "me too" Steam Direct platformer in a crowded genre offers nothing new. It's "free", but [i]free[/i] doesn't mean [i]good.[/i] 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. Now on to pricing and value for gamers. This is "free" enough (not every "free" game in the "free" section is truly free, there's usually some hidden price tag), 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, and the cost of a game is more than just financial, your time is valuable too. You can always judge a game by how popular it is with the general public. Steam has over 130 million unique gamers, and over 40 million unique logons every day from dedicated PC gamers. But this only ever had a peak player count of a dozen or so people... that's very poor public reception. Gamers rejected this, most likely due to the reasons I supply in this review. 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? What's the verdict? Not this time. This isn't worth downloading. While this won't cost you any money, you get what you pay for, and sometimes, even when the game is free, it's still not enough.