Rise of Balloons

"Rise of Balloons" is a somewhat charming puzzle game with some hand drawn illustration. The objective of the game is to click around to work out how to get some balloons to some kids. Okay. The graphics in this game are passable, but could be better. And while it's vital for any game to have impressive visuals (gaming is a visual medium, after all), there's more to a game than just the graphics. To be worth a gamers time, the game must match top tier visuals with top tier gameplay, and that's not happening here. It's free... now, but it wasn't before. The developer was charging $5 USD for this. Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It's a nice gesture for the game to be given away for free, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product. Perhaps this should have been released on the mobile app stores or as a browser game where it would have reached a more appropriate audience. Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 3 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. I could even go so far as to say maybe this is a little underrated, at least it doesn't use pixel "art", it's a novel and charming game. Far from the best game on Steam, but I think it deserved better reception than it got. 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? This is a "maybe" experience... if you have a lot of free time on your hands and nothing else to do, why not? But for the purposes of a review, this isn't something I can say everyone must try. It's not quite there. Valve doesn't give us a "maybe" option in reviews, but if they did, that's what I'd choose for this.