Scamp: High Hat Havoc

游戏一般般吧！

好的游戏值得推荐！

游戏一般般

"Scamp: High Hat Havoc" is an unusual entry in Steam because it's both free but also not (from what I can tell) a student project or some kind of cash grab or scam, it comes across as genuinely, if imperfectly made. What do you do in the game? This is a 3D puzzle-platforming adventure. The story involves a tiny imp named Scamp on a quest to rescue his master from an evil wizard in the Big Hat Mines. You can throw magic orbs, teleport, and use other imp-like abilities, including creating clones, to overcome challenges. Unfortunately the game suffers badly from "consolitis". 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. I guess once more consoles have made gaming worse for everyone. 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. This game is fairly dated at 7 years old... and even back then it looked average compared to contemporary, professionally made 3D games of the same period. It looked okay then, it looks, well, less than state of the art now. On the matter of pricing and value for gamers, most "free" games on Steam aren't really free. There's often nasty mobile app cash shops, or content locked behind DLC, or donations being requested, or any other number of shady pricing schemes that could mislead gamers, but in this case I'm glad to say this really does appear to be a fully free game. Nothing demonstrates a developers belief in themselves and their work than giving it away without any remuneration. This is a service to themselves, and the gaming industry, and should be applauded. Of course, just because something is free, doesn't necessarily mean it's valuable, or something you might want to spend your time on. Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 120 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. 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.