"Zako Slayer" is one of literally thousands of retro 2D platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere... and I'm not kidding. Searching for "platformers" on the Steam store page yields over 17,000 results! Is this one of the best of those? Absolutely not.
This abandoned Early Access train wreck may have been well intentioned, but the developer simply didn't bother finishing this badly concieved (and even more badly implemented) platformer about a female super soldier trying to escape from an invaded base after losing her memory, with the objective of breaking through enemies and escaping, which involves some of the worst attempts at making a platformer anyone on Steam has ever seen. Needless to say it was a huge failure.
Platforming is an old, mostly dead genre, and this lacklustre experience, while it doesn't have an upfront cost, isn't saving the genre... it's no surprise this failed to capture any attention from gamers in the era of immersive 3D gaming.
The developers abandoned this 2 years and 12 months ago. It will never be completed. This unfinished game is just polluting Steam and making it harder for gamers to find genuinely, completely made games.
The game is quite short, and can be run through in just half an hour. The lack of content here makes it hard to suggest it's worth spending the time to add to your library and download.
The game is really simple and unambitious in terms of implementation, more of a tech demo or one of those cases where an amateur developer spends $100 to publish something on Steam Direct to see if it's possible. Yes, obviously it's possible. A proof of concept, tech demo, or something that's less than a little blip on the radar isn't offering anything truly valuable to gamers.
This features really godawful pixelcrap "art" instead of real graphics. It's hard to say if this was because the developer didn't have the skill to do the job of creating 3D visuals, or couldn't afford to hire someone who does, but it also doesn't matter. What matters is that this looks much worse than most other games because of that decision, and that's a major deterrent to gamers. Games like Terraria and Stardew Valley succeeded [i]despite[/i] the bad graphics, not because of them.
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.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
So this is "free", but it's abandoned. Worse, it was never intended to be free. The developer intended to charge for this if it ever left Early Access... but the developer just couldn't be bothered. Making this abandoned pollution that gamers need to filter through when searching for products made by more ethical developers who fulfill their promise to deliver on their Early Access commitment instead of breaking that promise.
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 2 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
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? What's the verdict?
I think you should give this one a miss. Although it's free, your time and storage are valuable resources, and the market is filled with superior options.
