Paraiso Island

"Paraiso Island" is an unusual story, most garbage on Steam is straight to Steam Direct but the cash grab here is being run differently, not to let the cat out of the bad, but that's what this is, a cash grab, and not a nice one (if there is such a thing). What do you do in the game? What is it? At face value this is a really poor quality Playstation port, a godawful third person adventure game that would have gone straight into the bargain bins at a brick and mortar for a month, then straight into the dumpsters. The story involves helping an injured bat named Noodoo rebuild her life after a hurricane on a tropical island, where you meet various islanders and complete quests, but none of that is implemented well at all. The developers abandoned this 4 years and 11 months ago. It will never be completed. This unfinished game is just polluting Steam and making it harder for gamers to find genuinely, completely made games. And this is where we get to the toxicity... they couldn't work out how to finish the game. What they published on the Playstation was a failure, and also, incomplete (but console peasants like that kind of thing). But despite being unable to finish their game, there's an eye watering THIRTY FIVE UNITED STATES DOLLARS of near-empty cash-grab DLC for this garbage. Can you believe that? So that's why this is a cash grab. No incomplete game should ever have DLC of any kind; the developer seeks deliberately to abuse Steam Direct for profit. Because this is designed for consoles, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the inferior console gaming appliances that the game was designed for. These are unfortunate compromises and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was a second thought for the console-centric developers. The game is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for consoles forces upon a game. Once more, console peasants have made gaming worse for everyone. The graphics aren't great, godawfully bad D minus Playstation game assets. 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. This game is fairly dated at 5 years old... and even back then it looked old and busted compared to contemporary, professionally made 3D games of the same period. It looked bad then, it looks worse now. On the important matter of pricing and value for gamers, there's a lot going on here with monetisation, so this really shouldn't be considered a truly free product because of that. So this is "free", but it's abandoned. Worse, it was never intended to be free. The developer intended to charge for this if it ever left Early Access... but the developer just couldn't be bothered. Making this abandoned pollution that gamers need to filter through when searching for products made by more ethical developers who fulfill their promise to deliver on their Early Access commitment instead of breaking that promise. Even after that, you're expected to pay up $35 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". In terms of public reception, this failed. There's over 130 million unique gamers visiting Steam every month. SteamDB showed the game peaked at [b]only 6 concurrent players[/b]... 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? Definitely not. This isn't worth it. I'm paraphrasing another reviewer here, but this should be a paid product... they'd have to pay people to download it. They had time to make $35 worth of DLC but no time to actually work on their garbage game. What an insult.