"tranceWave NEO" is a godawfully bad homework assignment or something, described as a "trance shooter", this is code for "this is a crappy twin stick shooter with a soundtrack that will hurt your ears because it's so bad". First recommendation is to use Windows sound mixer to block any noise from this junk. Which leaves the game itself, and that's just a basic tech demo or something. Twin stick shooting is an obsolete genre, so for any new entry to go anywhere it has to be exceptional, where this is considerably worse than almost every other twin stick shooter ever made.
Here's another case where Itch failed. They have like, ONE job... to act as containment to prevent poorly made amateur shovelware from leaking out onto platforms where gamers might see them and lose hope in the gaming industry. But here we are. The participation trophies and hi-5's from the group hug weren't enough and some of the amateur drivel they're supposed to protect us from got out.
So this looks like an old 1990's Adobe Flash game that you might play in a web browser, and the problem there is obviously Steam wasn't intended to try compete with Chrome and Firefox. If it can be done in a web browser, it's not even close to a cutting edge PC gaming experience. That's a problem.
The graphics here are particularly awful, minimalist neon junk, miraculously finding a way for minimalism to be both too noisy and too ugly at the same time, so bad that it actually stands out as one of the worst looking games on Steam. Quite an accomplishment.
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.
Insultingly, the developer insists that you should play this with a console peasant children's toy gamepad instead of KB+M. 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.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
This is "free" enough (not every "free" game in the "free" section is truly free, there's usually some hidden price tag), at least you won't be expected to spend any more money after you download this, but just because something is free doesn't mean it's good, and the cost of a game is more than just financial, your time is valuable too.
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 2 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?
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.
