Path of Master 大師之路

[quote][b][url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtransaction]Warning: In-Game Cash Shop[/url][/b] This game is infested with a toxic mobile app style cash shop. You will be prompted to and expected to give money/credit card details to the developers through this cash shop to buy in-game goods so you can play the game.[/quote] "Path of Master 大師之路" is a garbage low poly 2.5D top down shooter brawler with a twist... toxic monetization is the main theme here as the developer tries to scam gamers into paying them money to unlock attacks. That's cancer. This is a cash grab. What do you do in the game? Really badly done third person brawling. And paying money to the developer just to play. Cancer. The game graphics look better than you might expect, but that's just because it looks like some or all of them are "borrowed" from asset stores or wherever. Gamers can tell... and it comes across as insincere. There's also the old adage that those who lack the budget and talent to make their own game assets usually lack the budget and talent to do the rest of the job of game development properly, too. 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. 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. This game is infested with mobile app store like microtransactions. This is a consumer hostile model that we don't need to see on PC. It's deceptively priced to gouge gamers, and that's a reason in itself to avoid this. The grift and cash grabbing keeps getting worse... this product is hooked into Steams "Totally not NFTs" Community Marketplace/Inventory, which means you can buy and sell and trade "tokens" (fungible ones in this case) for real world money, and you can "earn" these tokens by playing the game. This is never done with the interests of gamers in mind, the "developer" behind this gets paid for every trade, and has presumbly also farmed up a bunch of the items to sell on the market, too. This kind of Steam abuse, combined with a minimum-viable-product non-game, does no service to gamers whatsoever. A peak of [b]2 concurrent players[/b] (according to SteamDB) for a "free" game is a disastrous public reception. Out of 130 million potential players here on Steam, almost nobody was interested. Even though this is "free". That level of rejection speaks a lot for the quality of the game. Since free games don't contribute to your game collector badge and other profile stuff, is this a worthwhile addition to your Steam library? Nope. This isn't worth downloading. I didn't pay money, but I still feel ripped off. There are over 140,000 games on Steam, not every one of them is a hidden gem. I'm here to help gamers find the ones that actually matter in that sea of Steam Direct self-published mess. If you don't agree with my findings in this review, you should definitely download it and play it to see for yourself. I'm happy to have helped you make an informed choice, regardless of the outcome. You deserve the best.