Lords of New York

Fantastic production values. I hope someone picks it up and completes it some day. It's worth a look, even half-finished and abandoned. Do the story mode first, then try a few rounds of poker (Texas Hold'em). Don't forget to cheat!

"Lords of New York" is an abandoned Early Access poker-meets-RPG game heavy on narrative. And being abandoned by the developers, who carefully collected all the money they took from gamers and walked away over 7 years ago... not a single refund was given to the backers who funded the game. 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. It's free... now, but it wasn't before. The developer was charging $5 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. This is a slap in the face to everyone who paid for this in Early Access and was effectively scammed. 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. This isn't worth downloading. While this didn't cost me any money up front, I still feel ripped off.