"World Rally Arcade" is certainly tempting fate with the licensed World Rally Championship franchise, which this is not a properly licensed extension of. On the box it says pretty much what you think, a rally racing game, but what you get is WRC from Temu... a poor quality Unreal engine kitbash with only three maps, incredibly clunky and unpolished controls, and absolutely zero reason to want to play it.
What do you do in the game? "Race" around [strike]three[/strike] four maps with a laughably terrible car asset. What were they thinking? Struggle with the janky controls, give up all hope in life.
Since the controls can't be customized, this makes the game inaccessible for a wide range of gamers, including those who are left-handed, have physical impairments, or use international keyboard layouts. Developers have a responsibility to ensure gamers can customise their experience with the game.
The "game" here is of a pretty low technical standard. The implementation is basic minimum effort stuff, more like a weekend project rather than a serious, professionally made product... and it's bad even compared to most amateur made games. An experimental piece... and the experiment is "Can I spend $100 on Steam Direct and then call myself a game dev?"
While that $100 spend on Steam Direct probably made the developers feel good about themselves, we have to ask why this kind of thing is good for gamers. It isn't.
This game looks a lot better visually than the actual gameplay. It could be the developer purchased high-end assets (no proof of that), or somehow managed to create great-looking assets while delivering a mediocre game, in this case it could be either... but there's no hard proof this is an asset flip. But as always, ethics of asset flipping aside (whether this is one or not), what matters is the quality of the game, and this has all the same low qualities that we expect from asset flip shovelware. (Edit: Most of them probably are plagiarized based on the developers breach of Valve guidelines below, where he indicates he is a first time developer who had no idea what he is doing, so it's highly unlikely he created all of the assets alone... plagiarism is morally bankrupt).
Insultingly, the developer insists that you should play this with a console peasant children's toy gamepad instead of KB+M. Developers should try to be aware which platform they're designing games for. It's the responsibility of the developer to ensure the game runs well on the platform they're selling it on, with the primary peripherals that PC gamers use.
Let's look at the price and what kind of value this actually offers gamers.
Most "free" games on Steam aren't really free. There's usually some kind of monetisation, from nasty mobile app cash shops, or content locked behind DLC, or donations being requested, to any other number of shady pricing schemes that could mislead gamers, but in this case I'm glad to say this really does appear to be a fully free game.
Nothing demonstrates a developers belief in themselves and their work than giving it away without any remuneration. This is a service to themselves, and the gaming industry, and should be applauded. Of course, just because something is free, doesn't necessarily mean it's valuable, or something you might want to spend your time on.
Even as a free game, this couldn't find an audience. With a peak of [b]only 4 players[/b], it's clear the Steam community took one look and walked away. They literally couldn't pay people to spend time playing this.
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?
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.
[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 first thing the developer wants everyone to know is that they are "The Main Character". You, as a gamer, don't matter. They breach Valve guidelines for developers just to complain about a fully accurate and informative review (with facts their ego doesn't like). It's evident from their attitude that they never created this product with gamers in mind. They did so to stroke their own ego. When developers, especially failed ones who would never be able to get a professional job in the industry, put themselves before gamers, we end up with garbage products like this. That explains how this trash ended up on Steam, but it doesn't excuse it. At least we finally got to meet The Main Character, and nobody else matters.
On the matter of the additional map, the developer advertised this game with only three, but I have corrected my review. However, let's remember the developer's own words: "Race across the varied scenery of the European forest, a huge stadium, and the African savannah as you try to set the fastest time you can!". I can count, I guess the developer can't.
Now here's why this garbage should never have been put on Steam at all.
The developer claims this is their first time trying to make a game. If I went to a restaurant, got sick from eating bad food, and got told "The chef is new and has never cooked food before", would that make it okay? No, it wouldn't. The developer supplied a very valid reason why this should never have been put up for sale on Steam in the first place.
The developer admits they didn't hire a team of talented staff to produce the game and tried to do the whole thing on their own, instead. This is a lot like boarding an airplane, and halfway through the flight, having the pilot come out and serve peanuts. It's going to end in disaster. It requires a team of competent people to do a complex job properly, and that's not what has happened here... another explanation for the poor quality of this game.
This is not a game for gamers, it's a monument to the ego of "the main character", whose ability to push crap onto Steam Direct is far more important than the harm it does to the gaming industry for this deluge of crap games nobody wants. But you know, we don't matter, gamers, just this guy and his ego.
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.
