"PolClash" is a garbage 2D flash tier "brawler" where the developer incites violence against political figures, which is disgusting stuff that really should never be allowed. "Oh, it's just fun" you might say... so why not replace these political figures with people you know and don't like? Where do we draw the line at advocating for violence against people in these "joke" games? This kind of thing is never acceptable.
As a game, this is complete garbage, too, but it wasn't intended to be a game, it was intended to push political messages for the sake of making the developer get internet famous. Disgusting.
Whether we may or may not agree with the cause, it's my firm belief that politics of any kind has no place in gaming. It does no service to gamers at all for political or social agenda to be shoved down our throats, no matter which side is doing the shoving. We're here to have fun, not get indoctrinated.
Because the primary purpose of this product is totally unrelated to gaming, this really just makes gaming worse, and does nothing to further the developers political crusade. This is one of those things that gives amateur developers such a bad name.
So this looks like an old 1990's Adobe Flash game that you might play in a web browser, and the problem there is obviously Steam wasn't intended to try compete with Chrome and Firefox. If it can be done in a web browser, it's not even close to a cutting edge PC gaming experience. That's a problem.
On the topic of visuals, the weak looking 2D retro assets seem like they'd be more at home in a browser game or a mobile app. 3D graphics accelerators hit the mainstream of PC gaming in the mid 1990's with cards like the ATI Rage and Voodoo3D, there's no excuse for such poor 2D graphics in 2025. That alone is enough to disqualify this for recommendation.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
This is "free" enough (not every "free" game in the "free" section is truly free, there's usually some hidden price tag), at least you won't be expected to spend any more money after you download this, but just because something is free doesn't mean it's good, and the cost of a game is more than just financial, your time is valuable too.
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 2 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? What's the verdict?
Nope. There's no up front cost here, but I still feel like I got ripped off, and I didn't even spend any money. That's how bad this is.
[b]Note: Joke reviews[/b]
Because this is more of a "joke" game, intended to draw attention from controversy or in the hopes of going viral because it's "so bad it's good" (but it isn't good at all), there's nothing here to offer to serious gamers. As usual, with most awful/joke games, all the comedians come out of the woodwork. The vast majority of the reviews for this game are joke reviews, mocking the game for just how bad it is.
The comedians give us the usual "this game cured my cancer, saved my marriage, changed my life" story... sarcastic, but not useful if you want to know if the game is worth it. Because most of the reviews are as insincere as the game itself is, the positive review score for this game should not be considered an accurate representation of the quality of the game.
