"The Last Job" is a basic Unreal asset flip, yet another of hundreds, if not thousands of these first person haunted house horror jumpscare adventure games infesting Steam. I'm not kidding about how many of these there are on Steam.
What do you do in the game? Well, this asset flip is particularly awful and involves wandering around a badly slapped together haunted house asset collection, this time you're supposed to be robbing the place, but the only people being robbed here are gamers, of their time.
The game graphics look better than you might expect, but that's just because it looks like some or all of them are "borrowed" from asset stores or wherever. Gamers can tell... and it comes across as insincere.
There's also the old adage that those who lack the budget and talent to make their own game assets usually lack the budget and talent to do the rest of the job of game development properly, too.
Not every "free" game really is. There's often MTX, or content locked behind DLC, or donations being requested, or any other number of things that could mislead gamers, but in this case I'm glad to say this really does appear to be a fully free game.
Nothing demonstrates a developers belief in themselves and their work than giving it away without any remuneration. This is a service to themselves, and the gaming industry, and should be applauded. Of course, just because something is free, doesn't necessarily mean it's valuable.
Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at less than 100 concurrent players, they couldn't even break three figures, 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?
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.
[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 first thing the developer wants everyone to know is that they are THE MAIN CHARACTER. You, as a gamer, don't matter. They breach Valve guidelines for developers just to complain about a fully accurate and informative review (with facts their ego doesn't like). It's evident from their attitude that they never created this product with gamers in mind. They did so to stroke their own ego. When developers, especially failed ones who would never be able to get a professional job in the industry, put themselves before gamers, we end up with garbage products like this.
The developer boasts this is their first time trying to make a game. If I went to a restaurant, got sick from eating bad food, and got told "The chef is new and has never cooked food before", would that make it okay? No, it wouldn't. The developer supplied another valid reason why this should never have been put up on Steam in the first place.
The developer admits they didn't hire a team of talented staff to produce the game and tried to do the whole thing on their own, instead. This is a lot like boarding an airplane, and halfway through the flight, having the pilot come out and serve peanuts. It's going to end in disaster. It requires a team of competent people to do a complex job properly, and that's not what has happened here... another explanation for the poor quality of this game.
The developer complains that they "worked very hard" to make this, therefore it cannot be a bad product. What bizarre rubbish. If I had "worked hard" for years and the result was this godawful game, I'd be utterly ashamed of my failure. Hard work doesn't mean quality work, it just highlights the incompetence here.
For us gamers, for whom games are made (the developer seems to have forgotten that), it doesn't matter if GTA:V was made by one guy in a shed over the space of a weekend and Depression Question took 1000 staff working for 5 years to make, what matters is the resultant quality of the product. You can see the intellectual dishonesty of the developer made apparent from their comments.
It's evident and apparent this asset flip, from a developer and plagiarist who even admits he has no idea what he was doing, was not made with gamers in mind. Steam should not be seen as an ego-stroker for people who want to tell their imaginary girlfriends that they're game developers when no serious game development business would give them the time of day. But The Main Character thinks Steam is only here for him. You, the gamer, just don't matter to this guy. He wants to be famous for other people's game assets.
That explains how this trash ended up on Steam, but it doesn't excuse it. At least we finally got to meet THE MAIN CHARACTER.
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 asset flip to anyone.
