"Vincula" is possibly a student project or something... a simple weekend project looking product that takes the form of a 3D rendered top down fantasy brawler with a near-family-friendly theme to it and no real interest as a product for gamers... it failed as a paid product and then failed as a free product.
What do you do in the game? Some very poorly done top down brawling/RPG-lite gameplay.
This looks a lot like it was designed for consoles, but released on Steam instead by mistake. While this is on PC, it has all the hallmarks and deficiencies of a console game, from the clunkier than needed control scheme to the less than cutting edge graphics. There's 10's of thousands of PC games on Steam, and PC gamers deserve only the best. This might not appeal to many gamers due to the lack of PC-centric design. It's unclear why this never made it to the video game console appliances it seems to have been designed for.
The technical execution of this game is shallow and simplistic, just enough to tick the boxes required to get something (anything) published on Steam, rather than investing the huge amount of effort and budget needed to create a fully fledged, comprehensive, high quality product. This feels like a tech demo more than a full game.
Even though the game looks pretty bad (and decent visuals are a minimum requirement for any game), we can be fairly sure this is not an asset flip. This is because the game assets look so bad, no self respecting asset creator would publish them. That's a fail.
There's also the old adage that those who lack the budget and talent to make their own game assets of any level of quality usually lack the budget and talent to do the rest of the job of game development properly, too.
The developer chose not to do the job of a real game developer and create meaningful bespoke levels, narrative based gameplay progression and so on. Instead, they decided that "Procgen IS content!" and lazily tried to use procgen algorithms to create infinite, samey, repetitive, soulless levels, because that's a lot less work.
As a result of this poor decision, the game gets tired and repetitive almost immediately. Developers must learn that procgen is a terrible substitute for creating real content. It should not be used as "ez-mode" for content creation, as the developer tried to do here.
This game is fairly dated at 5 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 $4 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 [b]only 8 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
Since free games don't contribute to your game collector badge and other profile stuff, is this a worthwhile addition to your Steam library?
This one scores a "nope". While it won't necessarily cost you money, the time and hard drive space it requires could be better invested in one of the many higher-quality alternatives on Steam.
