Microgons

Hours played at review time, across 40 reviews with recorded playtime.

positive critical· bar length = how often the theme comes up

[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] This is a laughably unambitious Chess/TBS where you have various units and play out matches on a low poly 3D rendered procedurally generated grid. What a terrible idea. It's now dead, so you won't get a match even if you wanted one. It's a dead PvP game, and it's time for us to have a post-mortem to see some of the reasons this failed. [i]Almost every PvP exclusive game on Steam fails.[/i] Only a tiny proportion of them "go viral". This game failed for many of the same reasons those others fail. The chief of which is the developer thinking that their game will "go viral" without actually creating any reason for it do so. PvP games face extreme competition, PvP gamers have plenty to choose from and they gravitate to where all the other players are. This game didn't offer anything to peel those PvPers away from the PvP games they're already invested in. It had no upfront cost, but gamers still rejected it. First and foremost, there's no meaningful single player content. The developer gambled that other players would be an acceptable substitute for adding storytelling, level design etc to the Game. They lost that bet. Without a huge community of players or single player content to add a lasting value to the game, the game dies. Developers must learn that other players are not an acceptable substitute for adding content to a game. 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. Even though the game looks pretty bad (and decent visuals are a minimum requirement for any game), we can be fairly sure this is not an asset flip. This is because the game assets look so bad, no self respecting asset creator would publish them. That's a fail. There's also the old adage that those who lack the budget and talent to make their own game assets of any level of quality usually lack the budget and talent to do the rest of the job of game development properly, too. This game is fairly dated at 9 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. On the important matter of pricing and value for gamers, there's a lot going on here with monetisation, so this really shouldn't be considered a truly free product because of that. There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $5 USD for this. 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. Even after that, you're expected to pay up $5 USD to unlock content through DLC purchases. The game should not be considered completely unlocked until you empty your wallet for the developer. This is misleading and predatory pricing on a product falsely marketed as "free". All other issues aside (any of which would disqualify this from being worth your time), this is a game that relies on other players for it to be viable, and because there's not enough players, it's not viable. I can't recommend anyone downloads this, it's basically dead.