Is this one of the worst top down shooters ever made? Possibly!
"The Shattered Elements Arena" is more like "The Shattered Hopes Of Finding Anything Decent On Steam Direct". This is a really amateurish co-op (no network play though) orientated 2D top down retro shooter... a retrograde example of an obsolete genre that would have fared poorly even when top down shooters were at their peak.
What do you do in the game? You (and nobody else because if you ask your friends to play crap like this, they won't, but they will stop being your friends) take on the role of a wizard and use spells that are basically lame top down shooter attacks like a grenade, throwing a wall at monsters, there's a variety of attacks. It's just a crappy open top down arena with bland, badly drawn monsters to kill for no reason. Ignore the sales blurb about "phsyics", too, it's really just lame top down shooting.
The "game" here is of a pretty low technical standard. The implementation is basic minmimum effort stuff, more like a weekend project rather than a commercial/professional product... it's bad even compared to most amateur made games. An experimental piece... and the experiment is "can I spend $100 on Steam Direct and then call myself a game dev?" While that $100 spend on Steam Direct probably made the developers feel good about themselves, we have to ask why this kind of thing is good for gamers. It isn't.
In terms of visuals, this features really godawful MS-Paint tier "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. The deplorably bad visuals here come across as an insult to gamers.
Insultingly, the developer insists that you should play this with a console peasant children's toy gamepad instead of KB+M. You cannot play this without a console peasant children's toy. Developers should try to be aware which platform they're designing games for. It's the responsibility of the developer to ensure the game runs well on the platform they're selling it on, with the primary peripherals that PC gamers use.
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 $3 USD for this.
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.
Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB shows this peaked at [b]only 3 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
This "free" game won't count toward your game collection count on your profile. With that in mind, is it something you should still download?
Nope. This isn't worth downloading. There's no financial cost up-front, but you'd still be spending your time and a little hard drive space on a product that's far from the best. There's thousands of better alternatives on Steam.
