TheFighters Online

"TheFighters Online" is an extremely badly made Unity third person arcade/console fighter/versus game (never got accepted on consoles, Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft has QA departments where Valve has "Steam Direct"). What do you do in the game? Extremely sloppy, badly done arcade fighting against blobby looking, badly done/rehashed stock assets with an asset flipped backdrop. The lack of customizable controls is a significant drawback. This decision makes the game potentially unplayable for gamers with physical disabilities, left-handed players, or those using non-QWERTY keyboard layouts like AZERTY. The game graphics look better than you might expect (and they still look pretty bad), 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. Painfully glaring here. The UI is a train wreck, there's not much in the way of optimisation, customisation or controller tuning, so all the back end and UI elements of the game design are on par with the gameplay and the visuals... some of the worst on Steam. 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. In terms of public reception, this failed. There's over 130 million unique gamers visiting Steam every month. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 5 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. Given that this free title won't increase your game collector count, is it worth your time to add it to your library? I think you should give this one a miss. Although it's free, your time and storage are valuable resources, and the market is filled with superior options. [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 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 wants you to know they "learned a lot" by publishing garbage on Steam Direct where nobody wanted it. That really hammers home the point... this is Steam, for gamers, it's not for incompetent developers who have no idea what they are doing to dump garbage homework assignments onto Steam just to "learn" anything... developers should know what they're doing before [b]anything[/b] else. Polluting Steam with garbage from developers who now apparently admit they are unqualified and unfit to publish products they know aren't good enough for Steam hurts everyone, and it gives amateur developers an even worse name. 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 garbage asset flip to anyone.