"Portal Defense" is a really lame 2D retro pixel soldier attack/defense game... I usually see this kind of thing from asset flippers, although this one seems genuinely made, if entirely derivative and actually worse than most of the other games in the same genre.
What do you do in the game? Like all soldier attack/defense games, you and your enemy are at other sides of a 2D field and the objective is to spam out soldiers faster than the other guy. Every unit you buy marches off to pound or get pounded by the enemy, so whoever spams out the most wins. That's all there is to it... even mobile apps and browser games have deeper gameplay.
This features really godawful pixelcrap "art" instead of real graphics. It's hard to say if this was because the developer didn't have the skill to do the job of creating 3D visuals, or couldn't afford to hire someone who does, but it also doesn't matter. What matters is that this looks much worse than most other games because of that decision, and that's a major deterrent to gamers. Games like Terraria and Stardew Valley succeeded [i]despite[/i] the bad graphics, not because of them.
Not every "free" game really is. There's often MTX, or content locked behind DLC, or donations being requested, or any other number of things that could mislead gamers, but in this case I'm glad to say this really does appear to be a fully free game.
Nothing demonstrates a developers belief in themselves and their work than giving it away without any remuneration. This is a service to themselves, and the gaming industry, and should be applauded. Of course, just because something is free, doesn't necessarily mean it's valuable.
Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 4 concurrent players... 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?
Not this time. This isn't worth downloading. While this won't cost you any money, you get what you pay for, and sometimes, even when the game is free, it's still not enough.
