Outnumbered

"Outnumbered" is a rather weak ripoff of Geometry Wars, a bullet hell/shmup with minimalist, phoned in graphics. That's not to say this is the worst shmup on Steam, but there's no prizes for being the best looking guy in the burns ward. What do you do in the game? Some fairly average bullet hell/shmup stuff with random enemies, which kind of indicates a general lack of understanding about how bullet hell games work... where the gamers memorize the enemy fire patterns and encounters to beat the stages. So this makes an obsolete format even more pointless. There's an upgrade and progression system, but it's not worth engaging in this due to the incredibly low-fi visuals. So this looks like an old 1990's Adobe Flash game that you might play in a web browser, and the problem there is obviously Steam wasn't intended to try compete with Chrome and Firefox. If it can be done in a web browser, it's not even close to a cutting edge PC gaming experience. That's a problem. This game features very lacklustre minimalist "art" for graphics instead of anything remotely contemporary. I'm sure the "developer" thought this would come across as "artistic", but it doesn't, it comes across as "really lazy". Yes, contemporary 3D graphics take a lot of time and effort to create. That doesn't mean it's okay not to bother! Developers must try to understand that gaming is a visual medium, and gamers spend a lot of money on high end gaming rigs for a reason. And that reason is not so they can look at lazy, phoned-in half efforts like this. The developer chose not to do the job of a real game developer and create meaningful bespoke levels, narrative based gameplay progression and so on. Instead, they decided that "Procgen IS content!" and lazily tried to use procgen algorithms to create infinite, samey, repetitive, soulless levels, because that's a lot less work. As a result of this poor decision, the game gets tired and repetitive almost immediately. Developers must learn that procgen is a terrible substitute for creating real content. It should not be used as "ez-mode" for content creation, as the developer tried to do here. Now on to pricing and value for gamers. You're expected to pay up $3 USD to unlock content through DLC purchases. The game should not be considered completely unlocked until you empty your wallet for the developer. This is misleading and predatory pricing on a product falsely marketed as "free". 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? What's the verdict? I think you should give this one a miss. Although it's free, your time and storage are valuable resources, and the market is filled with superior options.