"Scrambled Eggs" is maybe a bit of a joke game, a simple premise that works perhaps like an arcade game. Chickens are crossing the road en masse and you have to dispatch cars to kill them and stop them getting across... kinda like a tower defense but somehow lamer. Outside of that somewhat jokey premise, there's not much here as far as games go.
The game is really simple and unambitious in terms of implementation, more of a tech demo or one of those cases where an amateur developer spends $100 to publish something on Steam Direct to see if it's possible. Yes, obviously it's possible. A proof of concept, tech demo, or something that's less than a little blip on the radar isn't offering anything truly valuable to gamers.
This features really godawful pixelcrap "art" instead of real graphics. It's hard to say if this was because the developer didn't have the skill to do the job of creating 3D visuals, or couldn't afford to hire someone who does, but it also doesn't matter. What matters is that this looks much worse than most other games because of that decision, and that's a major deterrent to gamers. Games like Terraria and Stardew Valley succeeded [i]despite[/i] the bad graphics, not because of them.
The developer chose not to do the job of a real game developer and create meaningful bespoke levels, narrative based gameplay progression and so on. Instead, they decided that "Procgen IS content!" and lazily tried to use procgen algorithms to create infinite, samey, repetitive, soulless levels, because that's a lot less work.
As a result of this poor decision, the game gets tired and repetitive almost immediately. Developers must learn that procgen is a terrible substitute for creating real content. It should not be used as "ez-mode" for content creation, as the developer tried to do here.
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.
In terms of public reception, this failed. There's over 130 million unique gamers visiting Steam every month. SteamDB showed the game peaked at [b]only 11 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
Given that this free title won't increase your game collector count, is it worth your time to add it to your library?
I think you should give this one a miss. Although it's free, your time and storage are valuable resources, and the market is filled with superior options.
[quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Response![/url][/quote]The developer has weighed in to inform everyone they didn't read the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Usage Rules[/url] for Steam "partners", or they deliberately ignored the part where Valve says:
[quote]Though it may be tempting, not every review needs to be responded to. A developer response will frequently draw more attention than the original statement, potentially turning a small issue into a much larger community discussion. It's also not a good idea to use this feature to refute customer opinions. Your direct attention can be seen as validation or a defensive attempt to silence your customers.[/quote]
The developer violates Valve guidelines for developers to aggressively shoot themselves in the foot several times, stopping only momentarily to reload before continuing.
Here's some facts to put the developers attempts to mislead gamers about their abject failure in publishing garbage nobody wants on Steam.
There are [b]more[/b] that 24,000 gamers who use SteamDB's free tools to auto-claim every "free" title on Steam... this was rejected even by the 10's of thousands of free game collectors on Steam. This is like being a tree so ugly even an arsonist wouldn't light it on fire.
Of that pitiful claim rate, having less than 18% of the claimants bother to idle the game with idler tools like ASF is [b]even worse[/b] than the dismal auto-claim rate.
The developer, this is the humilating part, thinks this failure, putting this as one of the absolute most rejected games on Steam, is a [b]flex[/b].
What a joke. This is textbook failure and the developer is celebrating... but the serious result for gamers is nothing but pollution on the store nobody wanted. And while we can laugh, this crap is harmful, because it takes up marketing place that should be afforded to genuine, competent developers who make serious, real games, not pixelcrap joke garbage. And it's harmful to gamers, because we have to sort past this pollution to find those sincerely and properly made games.
Yet the developer dances and sings about how this pathetic failure is a victory.
Nothing in the developers pointless breach of Valve guidelines changes any of the objective facts of my review. My review stands unaltered. I cannot recommend this game to anyone.
