It's obvious "Ultra Sweeper" is a blatant, low-effort clone of Minesweeper (Copyright Microsoft, 1990). It seems some "amateur" developers think copyright laws are optional, choosing to ripoff games from real developers without conscience.
Beyond the obvious ethical and creative bankruptcy involved stealing other people's game ideas, they failed the basic rule of game design: if you are going to rip off someone else's game, you have to at least try to improve on it. Instead, "Ultra Sweeper" is much worse than the original Minesweeper.
This feels more like a tech demo or a project smacked together hurriedly to try make a kind of minimum viable product just good enough to pass the developers unambitious idea and shove it into Steam Direct to see if you can actually pay $100 and publish junk through Steam Direct. Yeah, you can. Is this good for gamers? Nope.
The graphics aren't great, minimalist/low poly representations of the Minesweeper grid. 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.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $1 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.
A peak of [b]3 concurrent players[/b] (according to SteamDB) for a "free" game is a disastrous public reception. Out of 130 million potential players here on Steam, almost nobody was interested. Even though this is "free". That level of rejection speaks a lot for the quality of the game.
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?
This is a hard pass. There's no immediate financial commitment, but there are thousands of more compelling games on the platform that will give you a lot more enjoyment for your time.
