[quote][b]Note: Dead PvP game[/b]
This game contains no meaningful single player content. There's no viably populated servers/active player population. This game cannot be played as intended.[/quote]
This is a pretty lazy attempt to make a PvP arena shooter and "go viral"... but it's more cash grab than game... no incomplete game should have a $10 cosmetic DLC... that's an attempted scam if you ask me. Anyway, gamers resoundingly rejected this one... mostly due to the crappy graphics. This feels like someone got an Unreal FPS arena shooter blueprint then spent half a day populating it with garbage made by highschoolers in Blender, then quickly looked around to see how much money he could get for it.
So, "pla_toon" is a dead PvP game. Why did it fail? It's video game autopsy time!
[i]Almost every PvP exclusive game on Steam fails.[/i] Only a tiny proportion of them "go viral". This game failed for many of the same reasons those others fail. The chief of which is the developer thinking that their game will "go viral" without actually creating any reason for it do so.
Competition amongst PvP centric games is extreme, and there's only a finite player base to appeal to. This game failed to reach any kind of critical mass and died as a result. Let's go into some of the reasons this particular game failed to appeal to gamers, despite the zero up front cost.
First and foremost, there's no meaningful single player content. The developer gambled that other players would be an acceptable substitute for adding storytelling, level design etc to the Game. They lost that bet.
Without a huge community of players or single player content to add a lasting value to the game, the game dies.
Developers must learn that other players are not an acceptable substitute for adding content to a game.
The developers abandoned this 6 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.
The graphics here are particularly awful, so bad that it actually stands out as one of the worst looking games on Steam. Quite an accomplishment. 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.
Even though the game looks pretty bad (and decent visuals are a minimum requirement for any game), we can be fairly sure this is not an asset flip. This is because the game assets look so bad, no self respecting asset creator would publish them. That's a fail.
There's also the old adage that those who lack the budget and talent to make their own game assets of any level of quality usually lack the budget and talent to do the rest of the job of game development properly, too.
This game is fairly dated at 7 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.
It's free for now, but the developer intends to charge for this if it ever leaves Early Access... but considering the poor public reception, it's likely this will not be one of the 25% of games that ever gets finished and leaves Early Access.
You're also expected to pay up $10 USD to buy cosmetic DLC. Clearly the developer set out to profit from making this game and locking content, even cosmetics, behind DLC while still pretending the game is free is somewhat misleading to gamers.
All other issues aside (any of which would disqualify this from being worth your time), this is a game that relies on other players for it to be viable, and because there's not enough players, it's not viable. I can't recommend anyone downloads this, it's basically dead.
