Thousands of retro 2D platformers are infesting Steam, and "The SOL Device 2" is just more pollution in a crowded market of terrible games. There are over 17,000 platformers on Steam, literally thousands (you can go see for yourself if you search for the platformer tag on the store, I'm not kidding). And this is far from being one of the best of those.
This is a really badly made, rejected and abandoned 2D retro platformer with MS-Paint graphics. There's some nonsense plot that's worse than a sci-fi fan-fiction, and gameplay that has you doing a bit of combat and a bit of adventuring in a 2D platformer format, but it's incomplete and abandoned.
This is a tired, outdated experience from a tired, outdated and obsolete game genre. Just a couple of platformers out of literally thousands have any appeal for gamers lately (Super Meat Boy, Hollow Knight etc). This "me too" Steam Direct platformer in a crowded genre offers nothing new. It's "free", but [i]free[/i] doesn't mean [i]good.[/i]
The developers gave up on this 4 years and 6 months ago. It's destined to remain unfinished. This junkware is just polluting Steam and making it difficult for gamers to fully finished, completed games. That's not good for gamers.
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.
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.
This was made with the godawful "GameMaker Studio" construction kit/toolset, which is popular amongst amateur developers because it handholds you through making really crap 2D games that you can publish for $100 on Steam Direct. This lets you pat yourself on the back for pretending to be a real game developer, which explains why GameMaker Studio is responsible for so much ignored garbage on Steam.
GameMaker Studio has never really been used to make a truly successful game, but that doesn't stop people from trying and failing. It's a particularly bad game engine that can only be used for making low quality 2D products. Like this. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, as the old saying goes. Another reason this particular game wasn't successful.
Let's talk about price and the value this represents for us gamers.
So this is "free", but it's abandoned. Worse, it was never intended to be free. The developer intended to charge for this if it ever left Early Access... but the developer just couldn't be bothered. Making this abandoned pollution that gamers need to filter through when searching for products made by more ethical developers who fulfill their promise to deliver on their Early Access commitment instead of breaking that promise.
Even as a free game, this couldn't find an audience. With a peak of [b]only 2 players[/b], it's clear the Steam community took one look and walked away. They literally couldn't pay people to spend time playing this.
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 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.
Finally, I write these reviews to try help people navigate the thousands of games on Steam so they don't waste time on low quality products. There's over 140,000 games on Steam... Steam Direct is allowing an influx of around 40-50 new games [i]every day![/i]. If you think I'm wrong about this one, go ahead and add it to your library, download it, install it, play it and see for yourself. Maybe you'll come to agree with me after wasting your time. Either way, consider writing your own reviews too. I'm just glad if my review helps give gamers enough info to make a better informed choice.
