"Road Toad" is an unabashed, lazy ripoff of Frogger (Copyright Konami, 1981). Many lazy "amateur" developers don't pay attention to their obligations under copyright law, and often steal the ideas of actual, real game developers without credit, such as the "developer" here has done... and this is not strictly legal. Tetris Holdings LLC vs Xio Interactive in the NJ district court showed that it's not okay to outright steal the work and game designs of others.
Putting aside the unethical intellectual, creative and moral bankruptcy of stealing someone else's game concept, this is also breaking that unwritten law of stealing other people's game ideas... you should at least try to do better than the game you're ripping off. "Road Toad" is considerably worse than Frogger.
The developers haven't touched this for 18 months. It's deep in development hell and there's every likelihood this will never be completed. This unfinished game is just polluting Steam and making it harder for gamers to find genuinely, completely made games.
The "game" here is of a pretty low technical standard. The implementation is basic minimum effort stuff, more like a weekend project rather than a serious, professionally made product... and it's bad even compared to most amateur made games. An experimental piece... and the experiment is "Can I spend $100 on Steam Direct and then call myself a game dev?"
While that $100 spend on Steam Direct probably made the developers feel good about themselves, we have to ask why this kind of thing is good for gamers. It isn't.
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.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
This is "free" enough (not every "free" game in the "free" section is truly free, there's usually some hidden price tag), at least you won't be expected to spend any more money after you download this, but just because something is free doesn't mean it's good, and the cost of a game is more than just financial, your time is valuable too.
Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB shows this 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.
Given that this free game won't increase your game collector count, is it worth your time to add it to your library?
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.
There are over 140,000 games on Steam, not every one of them is a hidden gem. I'm here to help gamers find the ones that actually matter in that sea of Steam Direct self-published mess. If you don't agree with my findings in this review, you should definitely download it and play it to see for yourself. I'm happy to have helped you make an informed choice, regardless of the outcome.
