"Off Air" is a simple and very mediocre arena shooter where you shoot a lot of lulzy bots. I guess probably the best thing that can be said about this is that it probably isn't an asset flip, the game assets look too bad for any professional creator to publish.
What do you do in the game? Seriously, it's just really boring arena FPS stuff. Shoot bots until you get a boss to shoot. Shoot the boss. Think of this like DooM but without the interesting level design, attitude, gore, decent gamplay, and great graphics. Basically take out everything that's good about DooM, and Off Air is what you have left. Publish that on Steam Direct for $100 and you too can be ignored by the vast majority of gamers on Steam.
The graphics aren't great, lazy low poly assets with an ugly cel shader thing going on that makes the bad assets look even worse. That's understandably a turn off for a lot of gamers, and it's a big contributor to the failure of the game to attract gamers despite having no up-front cost. Gaming is a primarily visual medium, and if developers want to succeed, they must understand that it's not an area for compromise. You deserve better than compromises.
On the matter of pricing and value for gamers, most "free" games on Steam aren't really free. There's often nasty mobile app cash shops, or content locked behind DLC, or donations being requested, or any other number of shady pricing schemes that could mislead gamers, but in this case I'm glad to say this really does appear to be a fully free game.
Nothing demonstrates a developers belief in themselves and their work than giving it away without any remuneration. This is a service to themselves, and the gaming industry, and should be applauded. Of course, just because something is free, doesn't necessarily mean it's valuable, or something you might want to spend your time on.
Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 3 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.
