"Randy And Teddy Adventure Road" is a poorly made low poly 3D platformer/Mario ripoff where you control Randy and his dog, Teddy. When I ran this up I thought it might be a student project given the laughably poor quality, but it turns out it's someone's sincere, if misguided attempt to make a PC game without hiring a team or obtaining the right level of capital to fund the project.
When you go to the airport, are you expecting to get on a multimillion dollar jetliner designed by a team of avionics engineers and built in a state of the art, billion dollar factory... or are you more keen to jump on the plane made by an unqualified forklift operator over the space of weekend using bits of leftover scrap and wood planks? Yeah. Same goes for video games.
Anyway this is a particularly mediocre platformer with bad graphics, bad controls, and 25 levels of utter mediocrity... and the most amusing part about this game is not playing it, but finding out the developer expected people to pay him $10 for it.
This looks a lot like it was designed for consoles, but released on Steam instead by mistake. While this is on PC, it has all the hallmarks and deficiencies of a console game, from the clunkier than needed control scheme to the less than cutting edge graphics. There's 10's of thousands of PC games on Steam, and PC gamers deserve only the best. This might not appeal to many gamers due to the lack of PC-centric design. It's unclear why this never made it to the video game console appliances it seems to have been designed for.
The game is really simple and unambitious in terms of implementation, more of a tech demo or one of those cases where an amateur developer spends $100 to publish something on Steam Direct to see if it's possible. Yes, obviously it's possible. A proof of concept, tech demo, or something that's less than a little blip on the radar isn't offering anything truly valuable to gamers.
In terms of visuals, this features fairly low quality low poly 3D graphics which will deter a lot of gamers, understandably. Gaming is a visual medium, and while some developers struggle with creating high quality visuals, failing to do so is a disservice to gamers. It's very difficult to recommend bad looking games.
You're forced to sign a highly questionable yet legally unenforceable End User License Agreement... for such a relatively low effort, low quality product, this comes across more as a delusion of grandeur than anything else. This agreement includes questionable requirements that may attempt to revoke consumer law protections that gamers expect to have, which is also highly problematic. Developers must learn they are here to serve gamers, not control them. I had my cat walk over the keyboard while the EULA was displaying, which fixed that problem for me.
And on such a poor quality game, this comes across more as a delusion of grandeur than anything else.
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 onto pricing and value.
There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $10 USD for this.
Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It seems like a nice gesture for the game to have no up-front cost anymore, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product. This is also a bit of a slap in the face to anyone who showed enough questionable judgement to pay money for this... nobody got refunded.
Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB shows this 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.
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?
I can't recommend this, it's not worth downloading even if it's "free". Steam has literally thousands of better choices.
