The Glade

[quote][url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_flip]Warning: Asset Flip![/url][/quote] Edit: This is an asset flip, here's an example of one of the many plagiarised assets the developer ripped off to make this asset flip - the [url=https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/1a-105051055-a6f3b541bb3f4fde90fe9794a4e48dfe]"Shopkeeper"[/url] asset really created by the actual artist, "Ptaki". "The Glade" is a familiar story from a (probably asset flipped) Unreal kitbash... it's a basic Unreal Engine survival template. You're trapped on an island. But something weird happened, so you have to, you know, punch trees get wood. And fight monsters. Which in the case of this abandoned kitbash, come from meteors in the sky, whatever. In fairness if this is an asset flip some small effort went into trying to arrange everything to make a real game out of it, but that turned out to be too hard so they gave up. (Edit: I was wrong, this is a definitely an asset flip). What do you do in the game? Punch tree, get wood. This is dead standard survival gameplay that feels hot off someone else's survival game template. If it's not, wow, someone put in a lot of work to come out with a result that looks like it was hot off someone else's survival game template. The developers abandoned this 3 years 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. Let's get into the technical problems. The assets look a little mismatched but they're also much higher quality than the actual game. It's a bit of a red flag for an asset flip, but there's no evidence or smoking gun in this case. While there's no proof, the overall low quality of the actual "game" part (an important part of the whole package that makes up a game) is indistinguishable from an asset flip, and no matter where the assets came from, the quality here is bad. This game is fairly dated at 5 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 $15 USD for this. Yeah... delusion. If this did turn out to be an asset flip, then the developer would have been trying to get rich from someone else's game assets and that's never okay. 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. A peak of [b]12 concurrent users[/b] (according to SteamdB) for a "free" game is a disastrous public reception. Out of 130 million potential players here on Steam, almost nobody was interested. Even though this is "free". That level of rejection speaks a lot for the quality of the product. 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? What's the verdict? Not on a bet. This might be "free" now, but I still feel like I got ripped off.