RunOut is one of literally thousands of "student" projects (in this case interns/new hires) infesting Steam. It's from Byking in Japan. While student projects tend to be better quality than most "amateur" made games, we must still question what value such projects have for gamers. As with all student projects, this isn't really a fully fleshed out game, it's just the result of an academic exercise, and as such it has much more limited value as a game than a professionally developed game would have.
Educational institutions and businesses should not be using Steam as a dumping ground for homework assignments (especially if the students didn't even pass the course). Sure, it helps their marketing and helps the students feel good about themselves, but this is another case of a business putting themselves before the needs of gamers.
The game is a free-to-play, 3-player action game about controlling unique robots to attack opponents. The subject matter is generic robot combat, lacking a compelling story. You engage in simple robot combat using movement, attack, and stun abilities... except of course, for obvious reasons, there's no players, this little Beyblade wanna be is dead and polluting Steam, another unplayable PvP arena gamers have to push aside when searching for actually playable, worthwhile games.
This is another case of Byking forcing new hires to create a game project then dumping that on Steam. Whatever Byking does inside their company is one thing, but foisting student/intern/new hire projects on Steam, knowing they have little to no value as real games, just because it's corporate policy isn't good for gamers, and as an advocate for gamers, educational institutions and businesses must start putting gamers first.
There's no English translation for the game, but that's okay. The language of bad games is universal.
This looks a lot like it was designed for consoles, but released on Steam instead by mistake. While this is on PC, it has all the hallmarks and deficiencies of a console game, from the clunkier than needed control scheme to the less than cutting edge graphics. There's 10's of thousands of PC games on Steam, and PC gamers deserve only the best. This might not appeal to many gamers due to the lack of PC-centric design. It's unclear why this never made it to the video game console appliances it seems to have been designed for.
In terms of visuals, this features fairly low quality low poly 3D graphics with a clunky metal/neon/sci-fi vibe, 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.
Insultingly, the developer insists that you should play this with a console peasant children's toy gamepad instead of KB+M. You cannot play this without a console peasant children's toy. Developers should try to be aware which platform they're designing games for. It's the responsibility of the developer to ensure the game runs well on the platform they're selling it on, with the primary peripherals that PC gamers use.
On pricing, this is "free" enough, 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 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 4 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?
Nope. This isn't worth downloading. There's no financial cost up-front, but you'd still be spending your time and a little hard drive space on a product that's far from the best. There's thousands of better alternatives on Steam.
