"Neonscape" is a pretty unambitious Unreal tech demo that seems to be orientated around a developer asking if it is possible to spend a hundred bucks to self-publish unfinished junk on Steam Direct. We already know the answer is yes! Valve will take money and garbage from any amateur developer, no questions asked.
What do you do in the game? This is a parkour platformer (think Ghostrunner/Mirror's Edge from Temu) without much content or reason to want to play it... you do some lame parkour platforming (running on walls, etc, yawn) and some really done Unreal first person brawling/hack and slash against suspiciously asset flipped looking robot assets.
Despite not being in Early Access, it's obvious this is an incomplete product... there's just like a tutorial and almost no other content. Developers have an obligation to deliver complete, not partially done products to gamers, that shouldn't be controversial. Whatever the excuses may be, it does no service to gamers for incomplete products polluting Steam like this. It makes it harder for gamers to find complete games, and it makes it harder for ethical developers who do the right thing to find their audience.
This game looks a lot better visually than the actual gameplay. It could be the developer purchased high-end assets (no proof of that), or somehow managed to create great-looking assets while delivering a mediocre game, in this case it could be either... but there's no hard proof this is an asset flip. But as always, ethics of asset flipping aside (whether this is one or not), what matters is the quality of the game, and this has all the same low qualities that we expect from asset flip shovelware.
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.
In terms of public reception, the "free" price tag didn't help. This peaked at a handful of players and then immediately cratered. With a peak count of less than 50 gamers (out of over 130 million gamers and over 40 million daily logons), it’s safe to say the PC gaming community has collectively decided to ignore this, probably because of the reasons supplied in this review.
Given that this free game won't increase your game collector count, is it worth your time to add it to your library?
Nope. This isn't worth downloading. There's no financial cost up-front, but you'd still be spending your time and a little hard drive space on a product that's far from the best. There's thousands of better alternatives on Steam.
