"Mechone" is a poorly made low poly 2.5D shoot 'em up/bullet hell, harkening back to the kind of garbage that caused the great video game crash of 1983. Sure, this looks slightly better than the thousands of copy + paste Atari cartridges that caused the crash, but not much, and this was published in 2022 (don't laugh, it's true). Also comical is the price on this but I don't want to spoil just how much this developer genuinely thought people would pay him for this garbage.
What do you do in the game? It's a shoot 'em up, only worse. Uninspired, bland shooting with poor level design and absolutely no redeeming features. Emulating 1942 or something like that would be infinitely more satisfying.
Since the controls can't be customized, this makes the game inaccessible for a wide range of gamers, including those who are left-handed, have physical impairments, or use international keyboard layouts. Developers have a responsibility to ensure gamers can customise their experience with the game.
The game is really simple and unambitious in terms of implementation, more of a tech demo or one of those cases where an amateur developer spends $100 to publish something on Steam Direct to see if it's possible. Yes, obviously it's possible. A proof of concept, tech demo, or something that's less than a little blip on the radar isn't offering anything truly valuable to gamers.
The graphics aren't great, really low quality game assets, poorly presented. The developer makes a big deal about this being "3D" but it barely is. That's understandably a turn off for a lot of gamers, and it's a big contributor to the failure of the game to attract gamers despite having no up-front cost. Gaming is a primarily visual medium, and if developers want to succeed, they must understand that it's not an area for compromise. You deserve better than compromises.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $20 USD for this. I am not joking. This is not a hoax. That is not a typo. The developer genuinely tried to get TWENTY UNITED STATES DOLLARS for every sale of this rubbish.
Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It seems like a nice gesture for the game to have no up-front cost anymore, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product. This is also a bit of a slap in the face to anyone who showed enough questionable judgement to pay money for this... nobody got refunded.
In terms of public reception, this failed. There's over 130 million unique gamers visiting Steam every month. SteamDB showed the game peaked at [b]only 2 concurrent players[/b]... 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.
