"Robo Cats" is one of literally hundreds of simple, minimalist 2D line art "Find 100 Hidden turnips" or whatever games... hunt through a simple illustration to find 100 hidden things. The first time I saw one of these I thought it was a fairly okay, if short experience... but the problem is, there's literally hundreds of these plaguing the store. They're fairly low effort when you think about what's needed to make a more genuine game.
The whole thing could have been done in a web browser. We have to ask if Steam was intended to compete with Firefox, Chrome or Safari. I didn't spend thousands building a gaming rig so I could play glorified browser games.
The other problem is just how many of these there are... they're practically spamming the Steam store at this point. It's close to pollution... mass produced slop that genuine game developers have to try to compete with to get visibility for their more seriously developed games. And that's not good for gamers, or for real developers.
For gameplay purposes, because the user interface for this game is mostly just 2D static text/images... it might as well be a web page. It's functionally no different from a browser game. And we all know, Steam isn't here to compete with Chrome and Firefox. If the game can be done in a web browser, it's just not rich or compelling enough to appeal to serious gamers on PC.
This game features very lacklustre minimalist "art" for graphics instead of anything remotely contemporary. I'm sure the "developer" thought this would come across as "artistic", but it doesn't, it comes across as "really lazy". Yes, contemporary 3D graphics take a lot of time and effort to create. That doesn't mean it's okay not to bother! Developers must try to understand that gaming is a visual medium, and gamers spend a lot of money on high end gaming rigs for a reason. And that reason is not so they can look at lazy, phoned-in half efforts like this.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
You're expected to pay up $3 USD to unlock content through DLC purchases. The game should not be considered completely unlocked until you empty your wallet for the developer. This is misleading and predatory pricing on a product falsely marketed as "free".
In terms of public reception, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at just a dozen or so concurrent players, and now there's basically nobody playing it. Even though it's free. This is a dismal public reception, but it's easy to see why gamers rejected it.
It's important to note that, despite this being such a low quality product, there's a number of positive reviews that all appeared immediately after the game launched, from suspiciously inactive Steam accounts that have reviewed almost no other games apart from this. Take the review score of this game with a grain of salt.
Since free games don't contribute to your game collector badge and other profile stuff, is this a worthwhile addition to your Steam library?
Nope. There's no up front cost here, but I still feel like I got ripped off, and I didn't even spend any money. That's how bad this is.
