Live Adventure

"Live Adventure" is a student project self-published on Steam Direct. It's from Rubika Supinfogame. Student projects might look better than amateur shovelware, but they aren't real games. This is just a glorified homework assignment. It lacks the depth and value you get from professionally developed product because it was made for a grade, not for players. Schools shouldn't be using Steam to show off student projects. It might be fine for the school's marketing, but it clutters the Steam store with pollution... we have to sort past all these short student tech demos just so we can find real, full games from professional developers. This is a case of a game dev college putting its own interests before the interests of gamers. The students somewhat incorrectly refer to this as a "second person" perspective game... that's not really true. In literary sense, the "First person" is "I", the "Third person" is, well, anyone, John, Mary, Xerxes, whatever. The "Second Person" is "You" and that's not really used outside of Choose Your Own Adventure and Fighting Fantasy books. Although, really, video games tend to commonly be second person from some perspective because, like CYOA, the game narrative makes the player into the "you" character. Anyway while it's important to point out why the students are wrong, it helps to see what that means for the game. The game relies on a dual-control gimmick where you have to use a console peasant childrens toy (one with little joysticks) because the developers never played PC games before. One stick controls one character, the other controls the camera (all games have some kind of camera so this is not quite as novel as the students thought). Let's break down the technical problems. The chief problem is these controls are locked, and they're absolutely awful and janky, to the point that unaddressed controller bugs can softlock you and force you to restart the game. This is not okay. The graphics in this game are really quite good, which at least makes the game look more appealing. 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. Insultingly, the developer insists that you should play this with a console peasant children's toy gamepad instead of KB+M. You cannot play this without a console peasant children's toy. Developers should try to be aware which platform they're designing games for. It's the responsibility of the developer to ensure the game runs well on the platform they're selling it on, with the primary peripherals that PC gamers use. This game is fairly dated at 5 years old... and even back then it looked old and busted compared to contemporary, professionally made 3D games of the same period. It looked bad then, it looks worse now. Let's talk about price and the value this represents for us gamers. It would be unethical for students to try charge money for their homework assignments, so you don't have to pay any money for this. But you'd still have to spend your time downloading this, and "time is money", as they say. There's the other problem, too... as a student project, this wasn't made for gamers. There's no requirement for them to polish and balance the game properly, all they need is something to show the faculty so they can get their grade and move on. Let's once more ask... why is that good for gamers? It's obviously not delivering a solid product. Yet here it is, on the store page, and here you are, reading my review for a student demo that's going to waste your time. While genuine amateur developers who made real products get ignored because they have to compete with this stuff. In some ways, this deluge of student projects on Steam is harmful to everyone. A peak of [b]7 concurrent players[/b] (according to SteamDB) for a "free" game is a disastrous public reception. Out of 130 million potential players here on Steam, almost nobody was interested. Even though this is "free". That level of rejection speaks a lot for the quality of the game. 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... the game visuals are great but whoever thought this sloppy console centric, bug riddled student project was appropriate to publish on PC was just wrong.