"Mikaira (Archived)" is one of literally thousands of retro 2D platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere... and I'm not kidding. Searching for "platformers" on the Steam store page yields over 17,000 results! Is this one of the best of those? Absolutely not.
This is a very amateurish platformer shooter with pixelcrap "art", worse gameplay than the visuals (it shouldn't be possible given how bad the visuals are but they somehow managed), and a weak and pointless plot about fighting a gang and a robot as some kid goes out to get revenge on them. It doesn't make a lot of sense, but it also doesn't make sense anyone would try to publish anything this badly made on Steam, either.
It says "archived" but it hasn't been removed from Steam yet, so it's still here polluting the place.
Platforming is an old, mostly dead genre, and this lacklustre experience, while it doesn't have an upfront cost, isn't saving the genre... it's no surprise this failed to capture any attention from gamers in the era of immersive 3D gaming.
The technical execution of this game is shallow and simplistic, just enough to tick the boxes required to get something (anything) published on Steam, rather than investing the huge amount of effort and budget needed to create a fully fledged, comprehensive, high quality product. This feels like a tech demo more than a full game.
This features really godawful pixelcrap "art" instead of real graphics. It's hard to say if this was because the developer didn't have the skill to do the job of creating 3D visuals, or couldn't afford to hire someone who does, but it also doesn't matter. What matters is that this looks much worse than most other games because of that decision, and that's a major deterrent to gamers. Games like Terraria and Stardew Valley succeeded [i]despite[/i] the bad graphics, not because of them.
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.
The poor quality of this game is also reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the game all-time peak user count was only ONE person. That's right, only one person ever used this at a time. When I tried this for the purposes of reviewing it, I equalled the peak user count for the product. OUCH.
The only user activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it.
Considering there's over 130 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
Since free games don't contribute to your game collector badge and other profile stuff, is this a worthwhile addition to your Steam library?
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.
