"Rise and Fall" is a completely garbage tech demo, a basic soccer minigame with a gimmick where the players can grow or shrink in size. Why? Nobody knows. The marketing material for the game describes this as a "game preview", so we should assume this isn't a complete game, and of course there's also no indication about any full, complete game, so... why bother?
The graphics aren't great... that will understandably be 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.
On the matter of pricing and value for gamers, most "free" games on Steam aren't really free. There's often nasty mobile app cash shops, or content locked behind DLC, or donations being requested, or any other number of shady pricing schemes that could mislead gamers, but in this case I'm glad to say this really does appear to be a fully free game.
Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 6 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.
[quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Response![/url][/quote]The developer has weighed in to inform everyone they didn't read the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Usage Rules[/url] for Steam "partners", or they deliberately ignored the part where Valve says:
[quote]Though it may be tempting, not every review needs to be responded to. A developer response will frequently draw more attention than the original statement, potentially turning a small issue into a much larger community discussion. It's also not a good idea to use this feature to refute customer opinions. Your direct attention can be seen as validation or a defensive attempt to silence your customers.[/quote]
This is a little disturbing as the developer indicates they started stalking me and feverishly reading through my reviews... either just obsession with me on their part, or desperation to try find something in one of my other reviews that would somehow change the objectively terrible quality of this failed "game". Whatever their motivation, creeping on reviewers like this is [b]not okay[/b].
The developer weirdly attacks this review as being "angry", implying that anyone who points out that their product failed is "not okay". That's insulting, to start with, and a bizarre response to a simple and factual autopsy for a failed game project from incompetent developers. Why would the developer breach Valve guidelines to attack a review in such a bizarre and irrational manner?
This is because the developer thinks that they are "The Main Character". You, as a gamer, don't matter. They breach Valve guidelines for developers just to complain about a fully accurate and informative review (with facts their ego doesn't like). It's evident from their attitude that they never created this product with gamers in mind. They did so to stroke their own ego. When developers, especially failed ones who would never be able to get a professional job in the industry, put themselves before gamers, we end up with garbage products like this. That explains how this trash ended up on Steam, but it doesn't excuse it. At least we finally got to meet THE MAIN CHARACTER.
Thus, the attack on this review is a coping mechanism as the developer is mentally incapable of coming to grips with their own failure. They transitively blame this review for their failure, as if somehow the game would have been a great success if nobody actually saw it or said anything about it.
The developer DEMANDS that I educate them, in depth, on why their game was such a massive failure that it was completely bypassed by over 120,000,000 Steam gamers (yes, a larger population than several countries)... and facts don't lie, this was a complete failure, objectively. Looking at a normal distribution of random samples, one would expect a higher hit rate than just 6 people. There's reasons gamers avoided this, and I provide some in my review.
If the developer of this trashware wasn't so full of themselves, they might understand that game reviews aren't here to instruct and teach developers how to make games. They should know this before they publish badly made garbage on Steam that nobody wants. Game reviews are here to inform gamers about which products are of high quality, professionally made, and worth spending their time on. But the developer is so arrogant, it's all about them, so what's good for gamers is something that never crossed their mind.
The developer delivers an outright lie... "we both care about making quality, amazing games." If that was true, they would never have made this garbage, and instead would have done some courses or something on how to make real games.
The developer demands that "We all have to start somewhere". If you went to a restaurant and ate bad food and got severe food poisoning, would it be okay if the restaurant told you the chef had never actually cooked food before, and therefore you MUST give a 5 star review? Of course not. What a bizarre position to take... but this is at least the first tacit admission from the developer that they are incompetent and had no idea what they are doing. That explains this terrible product, but incompetence is not an excuse. Certainly nobody should be saying "Hey, get this game, because the developer has no idea what they are doing"! But that is what the developer here is seriously arguing.
The developer admits they didn't hire a team of talented staff to produce the game and tried to do the whole thing on their own, instead. This is a lot like boarding an airplane, and halfway through the flight, having the pilot come out and serve peanuts. It's going to end in disaster. It requires a team of competent people to do a complex job properly, and that's not what has happened here.
The developer complains that while this review closely addresses serious problems with this product, it resembles other reviews I have written for other products that share the exact same problems and deficiencies. There's over 120,000 games on Steam. Hundreds, in some cases thousands of these games share the same defects which gamers should know about before wasting any time on those products.
However, the "developer" of this failed product arrogantly [b]DEMANDS[/b] that I find completely unique ways to describe [i]the exact same defects[/i]. What a completely ignorant, arrogant demand from a demonstrably failed developer. The developer demonstrates thier apalling attitude here. It's a sheer insult to gamers everywhere.
If I used completely different language to describe the same defects, [i]this product would still suffer from the same defects[/i]. Changing the wording of my review would not make this product better.
The developer argues that the number of people who play a game have no bearing on it's success. That's just batcrap crazy talk. Successful games have hundreds of thousands, even millions of players. Failed games, like this one, do not. That's because gamers like to play good games, and don't play bad ones. This is not hard to understand yet the developer seems to grapple with this basic reasoning.
Nothing in the developers pointless breach of Valve guidelines changes any of the objective facts of my review. My review stands unaltered. I cannot recommend this failed game to anyone.
-This Game is in EARLY ACCESS (Game Preview) and in active development, 
1) Hit the Ball Into The Other Team's Net To Score.