[quote][b]Note: Dead PvP game[/b]
This game contains no meaningful single player content. There are no available servers and no player population. This game cannot be played as intended.[/quote]
"Spectral Ascension" is one of literally thousands of student projects infesting Steam. It's from UCSC in the USA. While student projects tend to be better quality than most "amateur" made games, we must still question what value such projects have for gamers. As with all student projects, this isn't really a fully fleshed out game, it's just the result of an academic exercise, and as such it has much more limited value as a game than a professionally developed game would have.
Educational institutions should not be using Steam as a dumping ground for homework assignments (especially if the students didn't even pass the course). Sure, it helps their marketing and helps the students feel good about themselves, but this is another case of a business putting themselves before the needs of gamers.
This year the students had to learn around netcode, I guess, because they made a shallow and limited PvP Battle Royale game, basically a third person arena deathmatch game with a supernatural/spellcraft theme. It works from a barely functional perspective, but there's no players. One of the very first things that students should be taught is that "PvP is not content"... most PvP games fail because they can't compete with the incredibly strong, established competitive PvP properties. A lot of terrible developers rush out "me too" projects, sometimes spending a lot of money to do so, and, not understanding this basic axiom that they have to compete and be better than the games people are already playing, wonder why they lose money on a dead game nobody wanted.
The graphics in this game are passable, but could be better. The colour schemes are really garish, but to their credit UCSC generally teaches the students about the importance of visuals. 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.
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. So much for the matter of pricing.
Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 8 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
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. There's no financial cost up-front, but you'd still be spending your time and a little hard drive space on a product that's far from the best. There's thousands of better alternatives on Steam.
