"Running Through The Beat" is yet another one of those games where they discovered a completely new and unthought of idea, which is to bolt Dance Dance Revolution mechanics to any other game genre at all, which they think will make it better, and instead is a guaranteed failure. This happens a lot, and of course every time anyone does it they claim it's a completely unique idea, and it always, always fails. Like this did.
Today, they bolted Dance Dance Revolution onto a really crap attempt at making a minimalist neon parkour platformer with some even crapper music. It's a disaster.
This game features very lacklustre minimalist neon "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 onto pricing and value.
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 10 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?
This is a hard pass. There's no immediate financial commitment, but there are thousands of more compelling games on the platform that will give you a lot more enjoyment for your time.
Remember what I often say... if you don't agree with what I've said about this game, by all means add it to your library and play it. My review is just here to inform your decision, and if you think I was wrong and you downloaded the game, then I've done what I really wanted to do... inform your decision.
