RD's Adventure Mini Golf

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"RD's Adventure Mini Golf" is a weird mobile app tier minigolf game (not sure how much of this might be asset flipped but I can't see someone creating all these assets on his own for one person)... why did I say one person? The developer claims this was made for his son, and his chosen method of giving this game to his son is to charge him $5 on Steam Direct so he can download it. Exactly how severe is that restraining order??? (I'm kidding). But seriously if what the developer claims is true then there's no reason for this to be on Steam... and that's kinda backed up by the way this was overwhelmingly rejected by all the gamers on Steam (see below for the player counts). What do you do in the game? Well, it's minigolf, but really clunky, with godawfully bad controls and a serious need for polish. Really does feel like it's come off a template for a Unity mobile phone minigolf game. While I couldn't find this on the mobile app stores, everything about it looks and feels like it's a mobile app designed for mobile phones... for PC gaming enthusiasts, it's not going to give you a cutting edge PC gaming experience. That alone is enough to disqualify this from any recommendation. We don't spend thousands building gaming rigs so that we can pretend they're iPhones and play iPhone games and mobile apps. I'm not sure if this is an asset flip, but it's one of those cases where the assets just look much better than the rest of the quality of the game... a glaring inconsistency. There's no evidence, but as always, the biggest problem with asset flips besides the plagiarism is the deplorably low quality of the other aspects of the game, and even if the game assets are genuinely created for the game, the quality of the rest of the game is indistinguishable from that of asset flips. This game is fairly dated at 6 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. There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $5 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. 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 3 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? This is a "nope". While it won't necessarily cost you money, the time and hard drive space it requires could be better invested in one of the many higher-quality alternatives on Steam.