[quote][url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain_game][b]Warning: NFT/Blockchain Game[/b][/url]
This game is backed by blockchain/NFT trading and crypto tokens. To evade Valve's outright ban on games like this, the store page hides the NFT core of the game from Steam users... but you'll quickly be told to create a third party account outside of Steam so you can start earning and trading the NFT's baked into every aspect of this game. This is a cryptoscam and should be avoided.[/quote]
[quote][url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loot_box][b]Warning: Loot Box/Gacha Gambling[/b][/url]
This game uses random-chance loot boxes/"gacha" mechanics ("Chance based in-game purchases") to unlock game elements, as a form of gambling and exploits psychological vulnerabilities. This is done for the profit of the developers, regardless of the harm it causes to gamers. This is completely predatory and unethical. Gamers must be aware of the dangers of this predatory monetization and should avoid this completely.[/quote]
[quote][b]Note: Dead PvP game[/b]
This game contains no meaningful single player content. There's no viably populated servers/active player population. This game cannot be played as intended.[/quote]
The cryptobros really dumped out some hot toxic garbage this time. Loot box cancer and NFT cancer in the same game? And it's not even their game, they just stole and reskinned Worms/Scorched Earth and put their own name on someone else's entire game concept, but with NFT cancer. Holy crap this is why Valve needs QA on Steam Direct. And it might be good for gamers if Valve enforced their own rules about banning NFT cancer, too.
So yeah this is just Worms, but the characters you use are NFTs. The NFT stuff can all be seen on the developers website and other places where you can see the NFTs in the game are stored as SCRL Tokens on the Binance Smart Blockchain. Developers often like to complain about reviews that catch them pushing shady NFT crap on Steam and they usually like to lie about their games being NFT cancer (because, you know, this crap is against Valves T&Cs and will probably be removed as soon as they are enforced). Kinda hard to lie when the internet references to the blockchain back end to this NFT cancer exist.
But I digress, this is a crap P2W Worms ripoff and the people who have the best NFTs win. You would not want to ever play such a game, so I can't recommend it on basic design merits alone.
It's a dead PvP game, and it's time for us to have a post-mortem to see some of the reasons this failed.
[i]The vast majority of PvP focused games on Steam are failures.[/i] Most fail because developers assume just because the game project code completes a successful build, the game will instantly and magically "go viral" just for existing. There's nothing in this to appeal to gamers that hundreds of other PvP games are already doing better.
The market for PvP games is crowded and the player base is limited. This game never reached "critical mass", didn't "go viral", and didn't offer anything to differentiate itself enough. Even with no upfront cost, it failed to appeal to gamers for several reasons.
First and foremost, there's no meaningful single player content. The developer gambled that other players would be an acceptable substitute for adding storytelling, level design etc to the Game. They lost that bet.
Without a huge community of players or single player content to add a lasting value to the game, the game dies.
Developers must learn that other players are not an acceptable substitute for adding content to a game.
This is barely any different from a browser game from the late 1990's, yet has been dumped on Steam Direct as if it's a modern PC game. This just isn't up to the quality standards expected from contemporary PC gamers. If I wanted to play "games" like this, I'd be searching for free browser games in Firefox, not looking for Flash tier games on Steam.
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.
You're forced to sign a highly questionable yet legally unenforceable End User License Agreement... for such a relatively low effort, low quality product, this comes across more as a delusion of grandeur than anything else. This agreement includes questionable requirements that may attempt to revoke consumer law protections that gamers expect to have, which is also highly problematic. Developers must learn they are here to serve gamers, not control them. I had my cat walk over the keyboard while the EULA was displaying, which fixed that problem for me.
Let's talk about price and the value this represents for us gamers.
This game is infested with mobile app store like microtransactions. This is a consumer hostile model that we don't need to see on PC. It's deceptively priced to gouge gamers, and that's a reason in itself to avoid this.
You can always judge a game by how popular it is with the general public. Steam has over 130 million unique gamers, and over 40 million unique logons every day from dedicated PC gamers. But this only ever had a peak player count of a dozen or so people... that's very poor public reception. Gamers rejected this, most likely due to the reasons I supply in this review.
All other issues aside (any of which would disqualify this from being worth your time), this is a game that relies on other players for it to be viable, and because there's not enough players, it's not viable. I can't recommend anyone downloads this, it's basically dead.
