Steam is drowning in thousands of lazy, low-effort top-down console reject shooters, and "ZED Patrol" is yet another one. I'm not kidding, there's over 6,000 of these on Steam, and almost all of them are garbage, amateur kitbashes. This is not one of the good ones.
This is a particularly badly made, contentless shooter where you kill some zombies (yawn) in endless, samey procedurally generated levels. Another case of an amateur developer thinking procgen is "ez-mode" for content creation... churning out endless algorithmic repetition with no soul and expecting that's what gamers really want. No, gamers actually want bespoke, well crafted levels from real developers, not robotic procgen.
In the modern era of high quality bleeding edge PC gaming, these kinds of flat, lazy, lackluster top-down shooters just don't cut it. This is a dead genre for a reason. Even though this is "free", it failed to attract any interest for gamers here on Steam Direct for obvious reasons.
This comes across as something unambitious and "simple" in terms of implementation and technical quality and depth, more like a game dev tutorial or an experiment. It’s a classic case of a developer prioritizing the low effort needed to get a game listed on Steam over the actual delivery of a technically sound or compelling product. Whatever is needed to hammer out something "good" enough for Steam Direct self-publishing.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers.
They have their hand out for a $16 USD "donation" for this as you're expected to give them money from buying empty DLC from Steam... digital panhandling. Like the homeless guys who splash dirty water on your windscreen at the traffic lights. No thanks.
A peak of [b]15 concurrent players[/b] (according to SteamDB) for a "free" game is a disastrous public reception. Out of 130 million potential players here on Steam, almost nobody was interested. Even though this is "free". That level of rejection speaks a lot for the quality of the game.
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 is a hard pass. There's no immediate financial commitment, but there are thousands of more compelling games on the platform that will give you a lot more enjoyment for your time.
[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.
The main character of the world supplies a number of confessions and "flexes" that turn out to be comical self-owns.. which we might laugh at, but polluting Steam with garbage on purpose is never funny, because it's harmful to gamers. Let's break down the train wreck, because it sheds a light onto why such a crap game got published.
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 developers bizarre and unhinged self-contradictions are many:
[quote]This game is not a kitbash.[/quote] It's not a kitbash?
Oh wait
[quote]Almost everything .. exception of some animations and things[/quote] Ok so it's a kitbash and the developer is angry about his lack of talent and blames gamers and reviewers for his failure, and not himself. There's a pattern emerging here with "the main character".
The developer does some bizarre mental contortion... it's a bad game but not badly made? Absolute rubbish. If it was extremely well made, it wouldn't be a bad game. Every decision the developer took when polluting Steam with this crap was a game design decision... about how the game is "made". What bizarre bullcrap.
The developer claims this is a "learning exercise". Steam is not supposed to be here as a dumping ground for incompetently made garbage and homework assignments... why on earth would that be in the best interest of gamers? Oh yeah, I forgot. This guy is the main character. He doesn't give a flying f%$# about what's good for gamers, all that matters is what makes him feel good about himself. 130,000,000 gamers are less important than this guy's ego.
The developer trots out some bizarre lie about developers being prevented from begging for money on Steam. Thousands of games do this. Why the developer chose to lie about their begging for money on Steam is unclear, but they certainly are trying to profit from this crap.
The developer boasts it took them 4 years to make this garbage. This is not the flex the developer thinks it is. If I worked for 4 years and all I had to show for it was this failed Unity kitbash, I would depart the industry forever. I certainly wouldn't publish the crap I made anyway.
The developer even admits they don't like the game.. but again, published it anyway, to harm gamers and genuine developers who do the right thing. This kind of egocentric Steam pollution is harmful to everyone.
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 game to anyone.
