[quote][b]Note: Dead PvP game[/b]
This game contains no meaningful single player content. There's no viably populated servers/active player population. This game cannot be played as intended.[/quote]
[quote][b][url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_flip]Warning: Asset Flip![/url][/b]
"Mahlone One" is one of literally thousands of creatively bankrupt asset flips infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere.[/quote]
This is one of those really weird asset flips where the developer is so shady they completely ripped out the entire game codebase and replaced it with an [i]entirely different game!!![/i].
This used to be called "Trinytz" which was a 1:1 asset flip of the UnitZ Unity asset pack, but then, astoundingly, on the 23rd January 2018, the developer change the entire code depot to a completely different asset flip (a basic Unity FPS arena shooter asset flip) and changed the name. We're not making this up, you can see the changelog at SteamDB... the developer is so shady that they couldn't be bothered paying another $100 through Steam Direct when their first asset flip failed so they just used the same Steam Store entry and renamed it!
What a joke, right?
What's left is this garbage that nobody wanted... swapping one asset flip for another doesn't help anything. We don't like asset flips.
So, "Mahlone One" is partially or completely made up of stock assets, "borrowed" from asset stores and free asset websites. Little, if anything in this game is the creation of the "developer".
While there's no up front price for this asset flip, the other problem with asset flips is that when developers aren't capable of doing their job and creating high quality assets, it's also true they can't do any of the rest of the job of a game developer either. That's definitely true for "Mahlone One", and this kind of asset flipping never results in games that have quality or value for PC gamers.
This game is fairly dated at 7 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.
This was made with the utterly awful "Construct" game construction kit... this is a "no-code" construction kit where you just drag and drop stuff and fiddle with a few menus to make primitive, minimum viable product games. That explains to some extent why this is so bad... no-code toys like Construct let anyone, especially people who aren't qualified to and should probably never make games, make them anyway. Combine this with the zero-QA "Steam Direct" program, and you can start to see why there's so much junk on Steam.
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.
In terms of public reception, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at just a dozen or so concurrent players, and now there's basically nobody playing it. Even though it's free. This is a dismal public reception, but it's easy to see why gamers rejected it.
It's important to note that, despite this being such a low quality product, there's a number of positive reviews that all appeared immediately after the game launched, from suspiciously inactive Steam accounts that have reviewed almost no other games apart from this. Take the review score of this game with a grain of salt.
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?
Definitely not. This isn't worth it. I'm paraphrasing another reviewer here, but this should be a paid product... they'd have to pay people to download it.
