[quote][b]Warning: Third Party Account[/b]
This game requires you to create a third party "www.Tanks2.de" 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][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]
"Tanks2.DE" is definitely one of the worst games on Steam. Abandoned Early Access, toxic monetisation, and below the quality of even simple mobile apps. What a disaster. Let's break it down.
What's the game about? Tanks2.DE is a basic 2D online multiplayer tank shooter. Set vaguely in the World War 2 era, players control tanks from a top-down view and engage in simplistic player-versus-player combat. The game offers little beyond driving tanks and shooting at opponents on maps with some destructible elements. And once more the developer blurb makes this seem way better than it really is.
The developers abandoned this 4 years and 1 month 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.
Despite not being able to finish the game, the developers apparently had all the time in the world to build a working cash shop microtransaction system and financial transaction back end into the game. That shows the developers primary goal was just to set out to gouge cash from Steam gamers just like mobile devs do with mobile peasants.
This features really godawful pixelcrap "art" instead of real graphics. It's hard to say if this was because the developer didn't have the skill to do the job of creating 3D visuals, or couldn't afford to hire someone who does, but it also doesn't matter. What matters is that this looks much worse than most other games because of that decision, and that's a major deterrent to gamers. Games like Terraria and Stardew Valley succeeded [i]despite[/i] the bad graphics, not because of them.
You're forced to sign a highly questionable yet legally unenforceable End User License Agreement... for such a relatively low effort, low quality product, this comes across more as a delusion of grandeur than anything else. This agreement includes questionable requirements that may attempt to revoke consumer law protections that gamers expect to have, which is also highly problematic. Developers must learn they are here to serve gamers, not control them. I had my cat walk over the keyboard while the EULA was displaying, which fixed that problem for me.
As mentioned, this isn't really free as the game is infested with mobile app store like microtransactions. This is a consumer hostile model that we don't need to see on PC. It's deceptively priced to gouge gamers, and that's a reason in itself to avoid this.
Even after that, this is only free in a rudimentary sense... the developer has their hand out a $5 USD "donation" DLC for this as you're expected to buy extra DLC from Steam to "support" the developer... digital panhandling. Like the homeless guys who splash dirty water on your windscreen at the traffic lights. No thanks.
Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 120 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?
Nope. This isn't worth downloading. While this didn't cost me any money up front, I still feel ripped off.
