"Unscramble Heroes" is a low key asset flip, a bunch of other people's assets assembled badly to make a basic game, typically this kind of thing is done by amateur developers without sufficient budget, talent and/or staff to do the job of game development professionally. It's then quickly rushed into Steam Direct. And, unsurprisingly, this never results in a product with any quality, interest, or value for gamers.
This is a basic anagram game where you "kill" various monsters by unscrambling some simple anagrams. The monster pictures are all stolen off the internet, but the developer gleefully slaps his own name on them so he can pretend it's his own work. Plagiarism is never okay.
So, the game might look better than you'd expect from an amateur project, but this is because it's partially or completely made up of stock assets, "borrowed" from asset stores and free asset websites. Very little in this game is truly the creation of the "developer", it's just a bunch of rearranged assets.
While there's no up front price for this asset flip, the other problem with asset flips is that when developers aren't capable of doing their job and creating high quality assets, it's also true they can't do any of the rest of the job of a game developer either. That's definitely true for "Unscramble Heroes".
For gameplay purposes, because the user interface for this game is mostly just 2D static text/images... it might as well be a web page. It's functionally no different from a browser game. And we all know, Steam isn't here to compete with Chrome and Firefox. If the game can be done in a web browser, it's just not rich or compelling enough to appeal to serious gamers on PC.
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 to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at just a dozen or so concurrent players, and now there's basically nobody playing it. Even though it's free. This is a dismal public reception, but it's easy to see why gamers rejected it.
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?
Nope. I didn't have to pay for this, but I still feel like I got scammed.
[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 brazenly admits they're plagiarising... they took someone else's assets, and put their own name on them. Gamers are not supposed to "guess" if a developer didn't actually create the assets in their game. When developers do this, they position themselves as having their name against those assets... it's 100% plagiarism. If they used someone else's work in a Hollywood movie, they'd be sued into the ground and never work in the industry again. They're tacitly telling gamers because this is their game, the assets are also theirs.
We also know that this is deliberate. It's easy to include a simple credits page. Why would the developer deliberately choose not to do this, if not to hide the true origin of the game assets from gamers? Claiming the work of others as your own, failing to credit the work of others, is highly unethical, [i]and the developer here now openly admits to it[/i].
Given the developers confession that they sought to mislead gamers and plagiarise the work of others (whether they paid for it or not, taking someone else's work and putting your own name on it is disgusting).
Take all of this abhorrent behaviour from an unethical amateur dev who could never get a real job in the industry against the context of the abject failure of this creatively bankrupt asset flip... SteamDB does not lie, this asset flip has nobody playing it. It's textbook failure from an incompetent plagiarist.
The developer LIES about the monster assets being their own creation, too.
Here's an example of one of the assets the developer STOLE used elsewhere:
https://pin.it/5APhXJGlw (Artwork by real artist, Alekzander Zagorulko).
You can also see many of the same assets the developer stole in the game "Dungeon Crawl Heroes". It's blatantly obvious the developer is lying when there's numerous examples of the same assets in other games.
Developers should perhaps consider not breaching Valve guidelines to tell OUTRIGHT LIES when those lies can be immediately disproven with a reverse image search.
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 asset flip to anyone.
