Moldbreaker: Rise of the Loaf

very challenging to finish the game, and very rewarding too. I had found the game a little too hard to collect all achievements which brings me back to this game time and time again. for a free game that has only 19 non-professional developers, I will be watching their careers with great interest.

"Moldbreaker: Rise of the Loaf" is one of literally thousands of student projects infesting Steam. It's from Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands. While student projects tend to be better quality than most "amateur" made games, we must still question what value such projects have for gamers. As with all student projects, this isn't really a fully fleshed out game, it's just the result of an academic exercise, and as such it has much more limited value as a game than a professionally developed game would have. Educational institutions should not be using Steam as a dumping ground for homework assignments (especially if the students didn't even pass the course). Sure, it helps their marketing and helps the students feel good about themselves, but this is another case of a business putting themselves before the needs of gamers. The students made a simple 3D platformer/brawler with a weird bread theme. They went all-in on that theme, too, so everything is the colour of a bread crust. This looks visually unappealing (and I'm a big fan of bread). But the real problems are with the sloppy controls and often broken hitboxes... as well as rather poor and unforgiving level design. But that all goes back to the key prob lem here... 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 game that's going to waste even more of your time than reading one of my reviews does. While genuine amateur developers who made real products get ignored because they have to compete with this stuff. On the important subject of visuals, this features fairly low quality stylised/cartoony low poly 3D graphics. It comes across as the kind of thing you see on mobile phones and Nintendo games, which will deter a lot of PC gamers, understandably. Gaming is a visual medium, and to be considered one of the best games on Steam, the graphics have to be some of the best on Steam. That's not happening 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. So much for the matter of pricing. In terms of public reception, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at just a dozen or so concurrent players, and now there's basically nobody playing it. Even though it's free. This is a dismal public reception, but it's easy to see why gamers rejected it. 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? I think it's best to skip this download. While it won't necessarily cost you money, the time and hard drive space it requires could be better invested in one of the many higher-quality alternatives on Steam.