"Kristal Mağara" is a pretty lazy Unreal asset flip from Turkey, the developers took some simple placeholder assets and dumped them on a basic rolling ball physics game template/blueprint. The only thing they forgot to do was slap a price tag on this so they could get paid for mucking around with someone else's Unreal assets and game code.
There's no English translation for the game, but that's okay. The language of bad games is universal.
The game graphics look better than you might expect, but that's just because it looks like some or all of them are "borrowed" from asset stores or wherever. Gamers can tell... and it comes across as insincere.
There's also the old adage that those who lack the budget and talent to make their own game assets usually lack the budget and talent to do the rest of the job of game development properly, too.
You're forced to sign a highly questionable yet legally unenforceable End User License Agreement... for such a relatively low effort, low quality product, this comes across more as a delusion of grandeur than anything else. This agreement includes questionable requirements that may attempt to revoke consumer law protections that gamers expect to have, which is also highly problematic. Developers must learn they are here to serve gamers, not control them. I had my cat walk over the keyboard while the EULA was displaying, which fixed that problem for me.
Not every "free" game really is. There's often MTX, or content locked behind DLC, or donations being requested, or any other number of things 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.
Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 3 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?
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.
[quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Response![/url][/quote]The developer has weighed in to inform everyone they didn't read the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Usage Rules[/url] for Steam "partners", or they deliberately ignored the part where Valve says:
[quote]Though it may be tempting, not every review needs to be responded to. A developer response will frequently draw more attention than the original statement, potentially turning a small issue into a much larger community discussion. It's also not a good idea to use this feature to refute customer opinions. Your direct attention can be seen as validation or a defensive attempt to silence your customers.[/quote]
The "developer", suffering some kind of nervous breakdown (these amateur developers will do literally anything to avoid accepting the fact they made an objectively awful game... and that's not my opinion, only 3 concurrent players, that's textbook definition levels of failure), breaches Valve guidelines... for no apparent reason, apparently, apart from to contort himself mentally to avoid accepting the truth about his failure.
The developer whines that because, factually, this game is from Turkey, I have somehow insulted the entire country. This is blatantly untrue. Perhaps if the developer thought about anyone but himself (this is a huge case of main character syndrome), we wouldn't be here.
If he had any regard for his own nation, that he attempts badly and absolutely falsely to claim that I am discriminating against, he would never have published this; it's a sheer insult to the entire Turkish game development industry. This asset flip single handedly makes the entire Turkish game industry worse.
If he had thought about what was good for gamers instead of caring about nothing but trying to pat himself on the back, he wouldn't have dumped this asset flip on Steam in the first place.
But no, it's obvious the "developer" of this garbage never thought about anyone but himself. And this failure and embarrassment is the result.
The developer claims this is their first time trying to make a game. If I went to a restaurant, got sick from eating bad food, and got told "The chef is new and has never cooked food before", would that make it okay? No, it wouldn't. The developer supplied a very valid reason why this should never have been put up for sale on Steam in the first place.
The developer admits they didn't hire a team of talented staff to produce the game and tried to do the whole thing on their own, instead. This is a lot like boarding an airplane, and halfway through the flight, having the pilot come out and serve peanuts. It's going to end in disaster. It requires a team of competent people to do a complex job properly, and that's not what has happened here... another explanation for the poor quality of this game.
The developer complains that they "worked very hard" to make this, therefore it cannot be a bad product. What bizarre rubbish. If I had "worked hard" for years and the result was this godawful game, I'd be utterly ashamed of my failure. Hard work doesn't mean quality work, it just highlights the incompetence here. If I had spent "months" learning how to make games and the best I could come up with was this lazy, godawful asset flip, I'd take legal action against my teachers.
For us gamers, for whom games are made (the developer seems to have forgotten that), it doesn't matter if GTA:V was made by one guy in a shed over the space of a weekend and Depression Quest took 1000 staff working for 5 years to make, what matters is the resultant quality of the product. You can see the intellectual dishonesty of the developer made apparent from their comments.
Finally, the developer of this train wreck [b]demands[/b] that my review instruct them on how to make video games, because they obviously don't know, looking at this dismal failure of this product.
There is no obligation for reviews to be constructive. Reviews are not written to teach developers how to make games. They should know this before they release products on Steam. If they don't, why does this have to be a problem for gamers?
[b]Video game reviews are written solely to inform gamers on their decisions around which games to buy, download, or spend their time playing.[/b] They are not intended to be game development tutorials for the clueless.
Nothing in the developers pointless breach of Valve guidelines changes any of the objective facts of my review. My review stands unaltered. I cannot recommend this asset flip to anyone. We wish the Turkish gaming industry every hope in trying to recover from this disaster.
