Vital Signs: Emergency Department

[quote][b][url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtransaction]Warning: In-Game Cash Shop[/url][/b] This game is infested with a toxic mobile app style cash shop. You will be prompted to and expected to give money/credit card details to the developers through this cash shop to buy in-game goods so you can play the game.[/quote] "Vital Signs: Emergency Department" is a basic, badly made medical quiz game, mostly menus rather than anything else. You're presented with symptoms and present highly spurious medical diagnosis in response, rinse, repeat. This feels like Two Point Hospital is a more reliable guide to medical analysis. 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. The game features really lacklustre 2D visuals (does the developer not know 3D graphics became mainstream in the mid-1990s?). Gamers don't spend thousands of dollars on gaming rigs and the latest 3D graphics cards to play 2D games. Even mobile phones and game consoles can do 3D graphics now. There's no excuse. 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. On the important matter of pricing and value for gamers, there's a lot going on here with monetisation, so this really shouldn't be considered a truly free product because of that. There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $5 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. Even after that, you're expected to pay up $16 USD to unlock content through DLC purchases. That's right, SIXTEEN BUCKS. The game should not be considered completely unlocked until you empty your wallet for the developer. This is misleading and predatory pricing on a product falsely marketed as "free". 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 7 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? Nope. I didn't have to pay for this, but I still feel like I got scammed. They seriously want $16 for a glorified webpage. Not okay.