Sect-Machina

Though I appreciate the fact that this was a group project for a school and that it has great potential, the finished product is just not a good game. It's even falsely advertised; it's not a Metroidvania at all. The game is simply unfinished, with many glitches and bad hit detection. It does have good art, mildly funny dialogue, and can be sort of fun to speedrun, but those are the only good things I can say about it.

É um jogo feito por estudante. Então não exija muito. Talvez nas mãos de uma equipe, o jogo poderia ter mais vida e não parecer tão vazio. Sem uma história, você parece um vilão que sai quebrando as coisas na cidade e descendo a porrada em outros insetos. Tem alguns objetos pra pegar que eu não sei pra que serve, flores para abrir que não sei o que faz, enfim, falta uma história, um propósito, um bom projeto. Mas mesmo assim não posso negativar, só falta mais trabalho.

Needless to say if an educational institution taught me incorrectly on purpose, I'd ask for my money back. "Sect-Machina" is a student project that ignores that 3D graphics became mainstream in the mid 1990's... there's no such thing as a gaming PC without 3D graphics. The faculty apparently didn't feel it necessary to tell students about that. It's going to be tough for any student to go find work in the industry if they can't even show they know about 3D video games. So the students were told that it's ok to just steal other people's ideas and also that people only want 2D games, certainly I feel bad for the students who'll be laughed at if they present a 2D game as their portfolio when applying for work at a real game development business. They'll be laughed out of the interview... if they even get that far. What idea did they steal? This is a blatant ripoff of Hollow Knight... and that's just sad. Developers should always, always, always look at the market and the gaming industry before embarking on making a ripoff of someone else's game, only worse. Thousands of cheap imitation games of inferior quality don't make gaming better for anyone... in fact that was what lead to the great game industry crash of the 1980s... low effort shovelware flooding the marketplace and putting gamers off. So this kind of thing is absolutely harmful to gamers and the gaming industry. What on earth were they thinking teaching the students any of this is okay? So about the game... it's just Hollow Knight but with less content, worse gameplay and pixelcrap graphics. Nobody wants this. When institutions flood the store with low quality 2D video game homework assignments, we have to question what value they have for gamers. They're not fully fledged games, they don't even have 3D graphics. It might make the students feel good about themselves to get this published on Steam Direct, but gamers have to wade through this stuff just to find the professionally made, fully fleshed out 3D games we really want. Now on to pricing and value for gamers. It would be unethical for students to try charge money for their homework assignments, so you don't have to pay any money for this. But you'd still have to spend your time downloading this, and "time is money", as they say. There's the other problem, too... as a student project, this wasn't made for gamers. There's no requirement for them to polish and balance the game properly, all they need is something to show the faculty so they can get their grade and move on. Let's once more ask... why is that good for gamers? It's obviously not delivering a solid product. Yet here it is, on the store page, and here you are, reading my review for a student demo that's going to waste your time. While genuine amateur developers who made real products get ignored because they have to compete with this stuff. In some ways, this deluge of student projects on Steam is harmful to everyone. In terms of player counts and popular reception, this couldn't even crack 100 players at its absolute peak. For a free game on a platform with 130 million players, that is a spectacular failure, mostly due to the reasons I've supplied here. This student project/tech demo/glorified homework assignment provides no Steam profile benefits, no +1 to your game count, and little value to gamers (because it's just a small, unpolished student project), so I can't recommend this over the thousands of full, professionally made games on Steam. Finally, I'm here to help save gamers time by filtering out the noise and substandard games. If you don't agree with my assessment of the defects in this game, go ahead and download it... maybe you'll find the same defects to be as unacceptable as I did, maybe not. Even write your own review. Positive or negative, game reviews are here to help other gamers by informing their decisions on what to spend their time on.

Sinceramente achei ruim

It feels mean to give a student thesis proof of concept a negative review, so I won't. That being said, no if you want a fun free game to play this isn't it. I don't recommend this as a full fledged game, but it is an interesting concept of an idea of a game, and it works. The skeleton is there, the mechanics and the aesthetic are all good enough, in fact I'd say it has a pretty neat art direction. But it does lack polish and an element to make it fun and to have a proper flow. Overall a pretty good effort, but definitely needed more to be a proper game.

La estética me llamó la atención, la premisa sonaba interesante… pero Sect-Machina simplemente no me dejó nada. No es que sea injugable ni esté bug. Funciona. Pero es uno de esos juegos que empiezas con curiosidad y terminas con desgano. Todo es correcto en la superficie, pero muy plano por dentro.

dude this game is so unfinished, im just gonna be giving a thumbs up cuz its indie and i get how hard it is to make a game, but if whoever's reading this think of playing, dont expect something good