"Survirus" is an extremely basic, and utterly pointless shoot 'em up with nothing at all going for it. Really makes you ask why anyone would bother publishing it. Yes, there's a "virus" theme that doesn't... you know, do anything with that theme apart from looking vaguely like a news channel graphic for what a virus might look like, as a skin for the game.
What do you do in the game? Well, it's a shoot 'em up, but dumber. Extremely bare bones, nothing notable in the way of power ups, upgrades, or reasons to want to play beyond score attack. It's a snoozefest.
The game is really simple and unambitious in terms of implementation, more of a tech demo or one of those cases where an amateur developer spends $100 to publish something on Steam Direct to see if it's possible. Yes, obviously it's possible. A proof of concept, tech demo, or something that's less than a little blip on the radar isn't offering anything truly valuable to gamers.
The graphics aren't great, minimalist wallpaper from the 1990s combined with extremely basic, primitive game assets. 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... and even back then it looked old and busted compared to contemporary, professionally made 3D games of the same period. It looked bad then, it looks worse now.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $1 USD for this.
Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It seems like a nice gesture for the game to have no up-front cost anymore, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product. This is also a bit of a slap in the face to anyone who showed enough questionable judgement to pay money for this... nobody got refunded.
In terms of public reception, this failed. There's over 130 million unique gamers visiting Steam every month. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 3 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
Since free games don't contribute to your game collector badge and other profile stuff, is this a worthwhile addition to your Steam library?
I think you should give this one a miss. Although it's free, your time and storage are valuable resources, and the market is filled with superior options.
