Paper Glider

"Paper Glider" is nothing to do with paper gliders, really. This is a 2D side view "Asteroids" type game but instead of blasting asteroids, you fly through a little obstacle filled maze piloting the ship from Asteroids. Which is more of a rocket than a glider, so the whole premise of the game falls flat. So this leaves the technical execution and quality of gameplay to review, and both of those are bad, too. At best, this a tired "me too" entry in an obsolete, dead game genre that died when mass market consumer 3D graphics cards happened in 1995. It's a poor premise that plays badly and looks worse. The shallowness of this makes it feel more like a tech demo or a project smacked together hurriedly to try make a kind of minimum viable product just good enough to pass the developers unambitious idea and shove it into Steam Direct to see if you can actually pay $100 and publish junk through Steam Direct. Yeah, you can. Is this good for gamers? Nope. 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. Now onto pricing and value. There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $5 USD for this. That's, at best, the sign of an incredibly imaginative developer... but more likely delusions of grandeur. Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It seems like a nice gesture for the game to have no up-front cost anymore, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product. This is also a bit of a slap in the face to anyone who showed enough questionable judgement to pay money for this... nobody got refunded. Even as a free game, this couldn't find an audience. With a peak of [b]only 2 players[/b], it's clear the Steam community took one look and walked away. They literally couldn't pay people to spend time playing this. This "free" game won't count toward your game collection count on your profile. With that in mind, is it something you should still download? 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.