MASTERMIND

Great and challenging

класс прям как 2 тим фортресс

I AM A MASTER OF THE MIND!!! (*proceeds to die of zombies*)

It's a short and alright student project to kill half an hour to a full one. The controls are a bit clunky and there's no melee option, but it's not a hard game if you manage your resources right.

"MASTERMIND" is just another student project dumped onto the Steam store, one of thousands. It's from Silpakorn University in Thailand. 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 should stop using Steam to show off student work. It is fine for the school's marketing, but it clutters Steam... we have to sort through these short student demos to find real, full games. That's a kind of pollution. This is a case of an game dev college putting its own interests before the interests of gamers. The students made a truly awful game, but yet still even not close to being one of the worst on Steam.. I digress. This is a wave survival FPS where you're stuck in a generic asset flip looking (yet not asset flipped, just bad looking incidentally) building and you shoot waves of low poly enemies. It's a pointless, directionless yawnfest. In terms of visuals, this features fairly low quality low poly 3D graphics which will deter a lot of gamers, understandably. Gaming is a visual medium, and while some developers struggle with creating high quality visuals, failing to do so is a disservice to gamers. It's very difficult to recommend bad looking games. The developer chose not to do the job of a real game developer and create meaningful bespoke levels, narrative based gameplay progression and so on. Instead, they decided that "Procgen IS content!" and lazily tried to use procgen algorithms to create infinite, samey, repetitive, soulless levels, because that's a lot less work. As a result of this poor decision, the game gets tired and repetitive almost immediately. Developers must learn that procgen is a terrible substitute for creating real content. It should not be used as "ez-mode" for content creation, as the developer tried to do here. Now on to pricing and value for 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]5 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. Given that this free student project won't count toward your game collection or add any achievements, and because it's not really a full game and more of a homework assignment, it's not a worthwhile download.