"Survive Now" is yet another ripoff of Vampire Survivors (copyright Poncle, 2023), but to date no legal action has been taken by Poncle against the developer. However, as Tetris Holdings LLC vs Xio Interactive shows us, the aspects of game design the developer stole from Poncle are protected by copyright law. Putting aside the ethical bankrupcy of stealing someone else's game IP, this ripoff is significantly worse than Vampire Survivors, although the graphics are slightly better, it's badly optimised, lacks basic customisation features, and just sucks to play.
What do you do in the game? It's just Vampire Survivors. Kite and avoid enemies, buy upgrades. It's just not as good, and abandoned.
The developers abandoned this 1 year and 11 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 game features really lacklustre 2D visuals (does the developer not know 3D graphics became mainstream in the mid-1990s?). Gamers don't spend thousands of dollars on gaming rigs and the latest 3D graphics cards to play 2D games. Even mobile phones and game consoles can do 3D graphics now. There's no excuse.
The developer chose not to do the job of a real game developer and create meaningful bespoke levels, narrative based gameplay progression and so on. Instead, they decided that "Procgen IS content!" and lazily tried to use procgen algorithms to create infinite, samey, repetitive, soulless levels, because that's a lot less work.
As a result of this poor decision, the game gets tired and repetitive almost immediately. Developers must learn that procgen is a terrible substitute for creating real content. It should not be used as "ez-mode" for content creation, as the developer tried to do here.
It's free... now, but it wasn't before. The developer was charging $2 USD for this. Price barriers, especially on unfinished, low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. This is a slap in the face to anyone naive enough to back this project thinking the developer would make good on their promises. Instead, the developers kept the money from all the backers they scammed. Not a single cent has been refunded.
Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. 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.
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?
Not this time. This isn't worth downloading. While this won't cost you any money, you get what you pay for, and sometimes, even when the game is free, it's still not enough.
