"Pocket Plants" is one of literally thousands of student projects infesting Steam. While student projects tend to be better quality than most "amateur" made games, we must still question what value such projects have for gamers. As with all student projects, this isn't really a fully fleshed out game, it's just the result of an academic exercise, and as such it has much more limited value as a game than a professionally developed game would have.
Educational institutions should not be using Steam as a dumping ground for homework assignments (especially if the students didn't even pass the course). Sure, it helps their marketing and helps the students feel good about themselves, but this is another case of a business putting themselves before the needs of gamers.
This student project has you play as a mushroom man whose goal is to restore an area by collecting, planting, and watering plants to clear fog and restore crystal light. This is accomplished through wandering around and collecting stuff, and clicking through some very simplistic minigame activities.
The problem, as it always is with student projects, is intense lack of polish. The movement mechanics in the game rely on mouse turning and mouselook, and you flick around fast enough to get whiplash. It's evident this wasn't adequately playtested, but presumably the students ran out of time and published this anyway. Once more, a student project teases us with what might one day have been an okay game, but never will be, because it's a student project that will never be properly finished. There's also a slew of bugs and problems that can lead to you getting softlocked out. Bugs, again, that will never be fixed.
The graphics aren't great, low quality low poly assets that would feel like placeholders if this wasn't just a student project. 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.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
It would be unethical for students to try charge money for their homework assignments, so you don't have to pay any money for this. But you'd still have to spend your time downloading this, and "time is money", as they say.
There's the other problem, too... as a student project, this wasn't made for gamers. There's no requirement for them to polish and balance the game properly, all they need is something to show the faculty so they can get their grade and move on. Let's once more ask... why is that good for gamers?
It's obviously not delivering a solid product. Yet here it is, on the store page, and here you are, reading my review for a student demo that's going to waste your time. While genuine amateur developers who made real products get ignored because they have to compete with this stuff.
In some ways, this deluge of student projects on Steam is harmful to everyone.
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 9 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
This student project/tech demo/glorified homework assignment provides no Steam profile benefits, no +1 to your game count, and little value to gamers (because it's just a small, unpolished student project), so I can't recommend this over the thousands of full, professionally made games on Steam.
