"They Came From a Communist Planet" is a poorly made RTS-lite about aliens arriving on Earth to trigger a socialist revolution, and it centers around experiencing a tale of greed and depression.
What do you do in the game? It's kind of a very lame and shallow "RTS" like experience, but really as the store blurb already makes clear, being a decent game for gamers was never a priority, this is a crap "art" piece intended to push political messages and hamfistedly deal with issues like depression.
Trying to address serious issues such as mental and emotional health through the medium of video games is misguided and can be harmful. While it's plausible to suggest the intention was noble, this can do more harm than good.
The "developer" here is not a professional in areas of mental health and social problems, and when they use video games to pretend they are, this is not only utterly ineffective, it can be harmful.
People suffering from health issues or other social problems should seek out professional help rather than going to crap shovelware video games attempting to get attention/fame by exploiting such problems for their own benefit, as is the case here.
Likewise, whether we may or may not agree with the cause, it's my firm belief that politics of any kind has no place in gaming. It does no service to gamers at all for political or social agenda to be shoved down our throats, no matter which side is doing the shoving. We're here to have fun, not get indoctrinated.
Because the primary purpose of this product is totally unrelated to gaming, this really just makes gaming worse, and does nothing to further the developers political crusade. This is one of those things that gives amateur developers such a bad name.
The game quality is really simple and unambitious in terms of implementation, more of a tech demo or one of those cases where an amateur developer spends $100 to publish something on Steam Direct to see if it's possible (and of course the aforementioned non-gaming related agenda the developer is pushing). Yes, obviously it's possible. A proof of concept, tech demo, or something that's less than a little blip on the radar isn't offering anything truly valuable to gamers.
The graphics aren't great, really low quality, sometimes minimalist game assets dumped on as a bare minimum/"that'll do" least effort. That's understandably a turn off for a lot of gamers, and it's a big contributor to the failure of the game to attract gamers despite having no up-front cost. Gaming is a primarily visual medium, and if developers want to succeed, they must understand that it's not an area for compromise. You deserve better than compromises.
This game is fairly dated at 6 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 $5 USD for this. That's very capitalistic from someone pushing a communist agenda.
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 [b]only 14 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
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?
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.
