Native Isekai Defense: Prologue

"Native Isekai Defense: Prologue" is not a game. It's an advertisement for a product called "Native Isekai Defense", a very mediocre multiplayer focused third person brawler that failed to garner any interest from gamers and may never be completed as it seems to be headed towards development hell. One curious aspect of Early Access is that when developers dump bad products into it, it can actually encourage them to abandon the project when they discover ahead of time that nobody wanted their game. Of course, this doesn't mean that developers refund any of the money they take from backers despite not delivering a game. Of course, the clock is still ticking for Native Isekai Defense, so we'll have to see if they give any money back to both people who bought it. But this isn't completely relevant because this is not Native Isekai Defense, it's just an advertisment for it, so it's not correct to try to review that completely distinct product. We must instead review this for what it is... an advertisement. If you enjoy advertisements, you can consume them for free on the web or on Youtube without needing to add them to your game library, download them, and then launch the advertising. It's impossible in a general sense to recommend people should do that over playing real, full games on Steam, and that applies here with "Native Isekai Defense: Prologue" too. The purpose of this advertisement, of course, is to get you to fork over a whopping $11 USD for the Early Access Native Isekai Defense... which is a bit rich considering that isn't a full product. So, an incomplete product advertising an incomplete product. Can you guess which direction my review of this advertisement is going to go? I bet you can. This is only free in the same way that adverts on Youtube and banner ads in your browser are. This is a game demo that's been dumped on Steam to advertise another Steam store page in the hopes of raking in some cash. Just because advertisements are free, doesn't mean they're worth your time. It's important to understand there's a formal process to create a demo/page for a game which hasn't been followed here: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/demos While it might seem like an inocuous mistake, publishing demos and advertisements as if they are full games is misleading and in some ways harmful. This advertisement is taking up marketing space and visibility that would be better made available to a developer that's done the right thing and created a full game. Instead, that visibility is given over to a demo/advert that's been published incorrectly and is polluting the marketplace. It's unclear if this mistake was made through incompetence or a deliberate intent to mislead gamers. Often developers may choose to incorrectly publish demo/advertisements as separate games as a cheap way to bypass paying Valve for marketing presence on the Steam front page, which may seem clever to them, but it's harmful behaviour and it's not good for gamers. Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 6 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? 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.