"Tachyonest: Rewrite" is another amateur train wreck here on Steam Direct... I mean, at least it's not a mobile app scam or an asset flip, that's something, but genuine intentions alone aren't enough to provide a quality gaming experience.
What do you do in the game? First person shooting... but imagine first person shooting done so badly, so jankily, so awkwardly, so incompetently that if John Carmack saw this he would have immediately nuked his Wolfenstein 3D codebase and never kicked off the FPS genre. Seriously, that's how bad this game is.
The developers abandoned this 1 year and 4 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.
Since the controls can't be customized, this makes the game inaccessible for a wide range of gamers, including those who are left-handed, have physical impairments, or use international keyboard layouts. Developers have a responsibility to ensure gamers can customise their experience with the game.
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 here are particularly awful, 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.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
This is "free" enough (not every "free" game in the "free" section is truly free, there's usually some hidden price tag), at least you won't be expected to spend any more money after you download this, but just because something is free doesn't mean it's good, and the cost of a game is more than just financial, your time is valuable too.
In terms of public reception, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at just a dozen or so concurrent players, and now there's basically nobody playing it. Even though it's free. This is a dismal public reception, but it's easy to see why gamers rejected it.
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?
This is a "nope". While it won't necessarily cost you money, the time and hard drive space it requires could be better invested in one of the many higher-quality alternatives on Steam.
[quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Response![/url][/quote]The developer has weighed in to inform everyone they didn't read the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Usage Rules[/url] for Steam "partners", or they deliberately ignored the part where Valve says:
[quote]Though it may be tempting, not every review needs to be responded to. A developer response will frequently draw more attention than the original statement, potentially turning a small issue into a much larger community discussion. It's also not a good idea to use this feature to refute customer opinions. Your direct attention can be seen as validation or a defensive attempt to silence your customers.[/quote]
The developer claims they know the game is not good enough for Steam (or anything), but we should be skeptical, because the game store page is still up on Steam... as always with dodgy/amateur developers, action (or inaction) speaks louder than words... the developer seems fine with this unacceptable garbage continuing to pollute Steam.
Worse, the developer now admits they are deliberately abusing Steam Early Access by working on an entirely different "remake" of this utter garbage that nobody wanted. Instead of abiding by the promise they made when they committed to delivering a product under the Early Access agreement.
All of this is once more because an amateur dev with Main Character Syndrome decided his ego was far more important than what's good for gamers, so once more, we have junk of deplorably low quality shoved onto Steam through Steam Direct, incomplete and abandoned.
Of course, the developer has all the time in the world to pore over Steam reviews, but apparently no time to work on meeting their broken promise.
Nothing in the developers pointless breach of Valve guidelines changes any of the objective facts of my review. My review stands unaltered. I cannot recommend this game to anyone.
Edit 2: The developer has now started stalking me, apparently. With attacks.
The "developer" argues that I review a lot of games, therefore this game review isn't valid or truthful. Huh. If I changed all my other reviews to positive, would the graphics and gameplay of this crap game suddenly improve? No. The developer seeks any possible angle to throw shade at me personally to discredit my review. You can see what they are trying to do. If this was the only review I have ever written, would that change any of the properties of this game or alter the facts contained in my review? Of course not. [b]My reviews for other games have no bearing on the dismal quality of this failed product[/b].
Remember to take this developers toxicity in line with his failure, too, with nobody playing this garbage.. apparently this guy has all the time in the world to stalk my reviews but no time to finish the game... abusing Early Access, in a deliberate and horrible way.
But he wants to attack me.
