[quote][b]Warning: Third Party Account[/b]
This game requires you to create a third party "Secret Of Dungeon's" account... there's no valid reason for this in a PC game when SteamWorks is available. This is often done to harvest private data and profile you, with potential sale and transmission of your private data to third parties. The developers will probably argue that you can trust them, but if they were trustworthy they wouldn't demand you create a third party account.
This represents a considerable risk to gamers due to the privacy and security implications of developers that wish to bypass Steam and harvest user data. Remember, sometimes if the product is free, YOU are the product.[/quote]
[quote][b][url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtransaction]Warning: In-Game Cash Shop[/url][/b]
This game is infested with a toxic mobile app style cash shop. You will be prompted to and expected to give money/credit card details to the developers through this cash shop to buy in-game goods so you can play the game.[/quote]
[quote][b]Note: Dead multiplayer game[/b]
There are no populated servers and no player population. This game cannot be played as intended.[/quote]
So, Secret Of Dungeon is a dead multiplayer game. Why did it fail? It's video game autopsy time!
This was a very poorly done attempt to make a 2D retro pixelcrap "MMORPG" with the rather crappy XNA engine by a bunch of Brazilian developers. The game text isn't all in English, and there's not enough Brazilian gamers with bad taste in gaming to get into this. And the developer has a sketchy account creation process that raises warning signs.
This game failed for many of the same reasons other PvP and multiplayer games fail. The chief of which is the developer thinking that their game will "go viral" without actually creating any reason for it do so.
Without a huge community of players or single player content to add a lasting value to the game, the game dies.
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.
As mentioned, this isn't really free as the game is infested with mobile app store like microtransactions. This is a consumer hostile model that we don't need to see on PC. It's deceptively priced to gouge gamers, and that's a reason in itself to avoid this.
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?
Nope. This isn't worth downloading. While this didn't cost me any money up front, I still feel ripped off.
