The Altered Lands is an abandoned Early Access third person fantasy brawler, or at least that's what it was intended to be. The graphics look pretty good, so I'm pretty sure these are stolen/asset flipped assets that the developer is trying to pass off as his own work. In line what what I expect from asset flips, while it looks nice in screenshots, it's a janky unplayable mess of a game, you'll frequently just get stuck on terrain trying to move around a clunky and unpolished gameplay experience.
This game has been translated from some other language into English... badly. If this was done through Google Translate, Google Translate should feel ashamed of itself. Regardless, the language in this game is broken and will put off a lot of gamers.
The game was abandoned roughly 7 months after launch and hasn't been updated in around 2 years. It blew past the developers commitment to complete the game without any notification or admission of failure from the developer. The game will never be completed.
The developer makes the admission, almost proudly, that they failed to allocate sufficient budget, staff, and other resources to the development of this game. Game development is a serious endeavour that should not be approached lightly. Failing to do so is a lot like trying to drive a car using only your feet. It can be done, perhaps, but it's almost certain to end in disaster. Trying to to the job wrong, on purpose, will not result in a product that has high value for gamers, as the "developer" has done here, with a predictably disastrous outcome. It certainly explains why the game was abandoned in an incomplete state.
The Altered Lands didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the game, either. It has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game didn't really capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for killing the first boss in the game, trivial to get, but less than 39 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. Hardly a success story, gamers just weren't all that interested in the game, even though it's now being given away for free. Gamers still aren't interested in it.
The poor quality of this game is also reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 3 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
Another unethical act of this developer, knowing full well that this game is abandoned and they will never complete it, they were deliberately trying to scam gamers into buying it by offering it on discount from time to time. It's impossible to "accidentally" discount a game. The developer looked at their abandoned game, and instead of doing the right thing and removing it from Steam, they instead doubled-down and tried to scam even more people into paying for it. Greedy, and completely unethical. Doing the wrong thing, on purpose, for money. This is not okay. Even though it's now free, the developer kept all the money they took from gamers without delivering a complete product. This is completely unethical, and making the game free is just a slap in the face to anyone who got scammed into paying for this.
The Altered Lands is now free, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, and the questionable ethical nature of the developer and/or their associates (as outlined above), this is impossible to recommend.
[b][quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/quote][/b]Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.
