[quote][b]Warning: Third Party Account[/b]
This game requires you to create a third party "Spelling Quest Online" 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]Note: Dead multiplayer game[/b]
This game contains no meaningful single player content. There's no players, no populated servers. This multiplayer-only game cannot be played as intended.[/quote]
This is a dead browser tier word/puzzle game waiting for Scrabble's owners to come in and sue. Can you sue a dead abandoned Early Access browser game if it's dumped on Steam instead? Who knows, watch this space, I guess.
The game isn't even complete, and there's no players, so you know how this review will go.
So, Spelling Quest Online is a dead multiplayer game. Why did it fail? It's video game autopsy time!
The chief cause of failure is the developer thinking that their game will "go viral" without actually creating any reason for it do so.
Competition amongst multiplayer centric games is extreme, and there's only a finite player base to appeal to. This game failed to reach any kind of critical mass and died as a result. Let's go into some of the reasons this particular game failed to appeal to gamers, despite the zero up front cost.
The developers abandoned this 5 years and 5 months ago. It will never be completed. This unfinished game is just polluting Steam and making it harder for gamers to find genuinely, completely made games.
The graphics aren't great, just simple 2D text on a grid, basically... if it could be done by Chrome or Firefox, it doesn't belong in your Steam library. That's understandably a turn off for a lot of gamers, and it's a big contributor to the failure of the game to attract gamers despite having no up-front cost. Gaming is a primarily visual medium, and if developers want to succeed, they must understand that it's not an area for compromise. You deserve better than compromises.
This game is fairly dated at 6 years old... it's showing a bit of age and won't give you a very up-to-date gaming experience.
It's free for now, but the developer intends to charge for this if it ever leaves Early Access... but considering the poor public reception, it's likely this will not be one of the 25% of games that ever gets finished and leaves Early Access.
Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 6 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. While this didn't cost me any money up front, I still feel ripped off.
