"Merchant's Rush" is a weird Unreal asset flip, although in fairness at least some effort went into making some kind of game, although probably more effort was spent browsing the Unreal Marketplace for assets to use rather than polish and bug fixing.
What do you do in the game? This buggy train wreck of an asset flip is an attempt to make some kind of "merchant" business simulator/tycoon game, and most of the game is your usual "could have been a spreadsheet or a web page" economic/business simulation menu clicking. There's a little bit of a strategy component as you can have little battles with the Unreal assets the developer is trying to pass off as his own, if your caravan gets attack, but you might not get far enough to experience that because of just how bug ridden this dumpster fire is. At least the developer didn't have the audacity to try charge money for this.
The game graphics look better than you might expect, but that's just because it looks like some or all of them are "borrowed" from asset stores or wherever. Gamers can tell... and it comes across as insincere.
There's also the old adage that those who lack the budget and talent to make their own game assets usually lack the budget and talent to do the rest of the job of game development properly, too.
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.
This is "free" enough, 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.
Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 3 concurrent players... 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?
Nope. This isn't worth downloading. While this didn't cost me any money up front, I still feel ripped off.
