[quote][url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_slop][b]Warning: AI Slop[/b][/url]
This game is partially or completely made with talentless, soulless AI generated content.[/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]
Steam is drowning in thousands of lazy, low-effort 2D platformers, and "Stick Figure Combat" is yet another one. I'm not kidding, there's over 17,000 platformers on Steam, almost all of them are garbage, amateur kitbashes. This is not one of the good ones.
Featuring some of the worst, jankiest gameplay ever, this is a "stick man" brawler following dozens of other "me too" stickman games, popular amongst incompetent developers because it lets them pretend they know how to make games when they obviously don't. It's like the new version of pixelcrap. Just do stick men, then you will get lots of money and be famous.
The platforming genre is pretty much obsolete... just a tiny number of professionally developed platformers exist on PC and offer any real value or interest to gamers (Silksong, etc). This is nowhere near being as good as Hollow Knight or Silksong. Even without a price tag, it is easy to see why gamers ignored this in favor of modern, professionally developed 3D games. This is offering nothing new or interesting, so it's easy to see why this failed.
This vibe coded AI Slop poses a challenging question to the gaming audience, and that question is whether the disgusting and insulting use of AI Slop is worse than the toxic, greedy monetisation on this non-free garbage. A mostly academic question because nobody really played this because it's obviously garbage, but we're still left to ponder what it is about this we hate the most. Let's break it down.
As mentioned, this features really godawful, "wrong" looking AI slop instead of genuinely and sincerely created game assets. It's hard to say if this was because the developer didn't have the skill to do the job of creating real game assets or couldn't afford to hire someone who does, but it also doesn't matter. What matters is that this looks bad because of that decision. AI slop sticks out like a sore thumb... and it comes across as insulting.
There's also the old adage that those who lack the budget and talent to make their own game assets usually lack the budget and talent to do the rest of the job of game development properly, too, and that's glaringly obvious here.
So the graphics here are particularly awful, AI slop, MS paint crap, so bad that it actually stands out as one of the worst looking games on Steam. Quite an accomplishment.
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.
On the important matter of pricing and value for gamers, there's a lot going on here with toxic monetisation, the developer seems to have sought out to deliberately abuse the free section of Steam with an obviously non-free, heavily monetised product, so this really shouldn't be considered a truly free product because of that.
There's a cancerous mobile app tier cash shop... this is another disgusting insult to gamers.
You're expected to pay up $12 USD to unlock content through DLC purchases. The game should not be considered completely unlocked until you empty your wallet for the developer. This is misleading and predatory pricing on a product falsely marketed as "free".
The grift and cash grabbing keeps getting worse... this product is hooked into Steams "Totally not NFTs" Community Marketplace/Inventory, which means you can buy and sell and trade "tokens" (fungible ones in this case) for real world money, and you can "earn" these tokens by playing the game. This is never done with the interests of gamers in mind, the "developer" behind this gets paid for every trade, and has presumbly also farmed up a bunch of the items to sell on the market, too. This kind of Steam abuse, combined with a minimum-viable-product non-game, does no service to gamers whatsoever.
Even as a free game, this couldn't find an audience. With a peak of [b]only 9 players[/b], it's clear the Steam community took one look and walked away. They literally couldn't pay people to spend time playing this.
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. I didn't pay money, but I still feel ripped off.
The use of AI slop is a direct insult to gamers and real, ethical content creators and artists everywhere.
