Steam is drowning in thousands of lazy, low-effort top-down console reject shooters, and "Security Guy vs AI: The Dawn of AI" is yet another one. I'm not kidding, there's over 6,000 of these on Steam, and almost all of them are garbage, amateur kitbashes.
Admittedly far from the worst game on Steam with tolerable (if maybe asset flipped) game visuals thanks to Unreal, this shooter has you take on the role of a security guard in a robotic factory, and yep, wouldn't you know it, robot uprising. Who could have seen that coming.
So you wander around corridors and twin stick shoot enemy robots with a variety of weapons. The weapons, by design, have a lot of spread, but I guess that's part of the charm. But this is no Alien Breed in terms of quality, even if it's free.
The top-down shooter genre is pretty much obsolete, even console peasants don't bother with them anymore. Just a tiny number of top-down shooters went anywhere on PC despite the little value they offer (Enter the Gungeon, etc). This is nowhere near being as good as those. Even without a price tag, it's easy to see why gamers ignored this in favor of modern, professionally developed 3D games. This is offering nothing new or interesting.
Since the controls can't be customized, this makes the game inaccessible for a wide range of gamers, including those who are left-handed, have physical impairments, or use international keyboard layouts. Developers have a responsibility to ensure gamers can customise their experience with the game.
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.
The assets look a little mismatched but they're also much higher quality than the actual game. It's a bit of a red flag for an asset flip, but there's no evidence or smoking gun in this case. While there's no proof, the overall low quality of the actual "game" part (an important part of the whole package that makes up a game) is indistinguishable from an asset flip, and no matter where the assets came from, the quality here is bad.
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.
A peak of [b]13 concurrent players[/b] (according to SteamDB) for a "free" game is a disastrous public reception. Out of 130 million potential players here on Steam, almost nobody was interested. Even though this is "free". That level of rejection speaks a lot for the quality of the game.
Given that this free game won't increase your game collector count, is it worth your time to add it to your library?
This is a hard pass. There's no immediate financial commitment, but there are thousands of more compelling games on the platform that will give you a lot more enjoyment for your time.
