Shapes & Shots - Prologue

Simple & Sweet... Slick & Smooth... Shapes & Shots

"Shapes & Shots - Prologue" is is not a game. It's an advertisement for a product called "Shapes & Shots". Shapes & Shots is never going to be made. From this advertisement we can see the developer was punting for a contentless (procgen instead of content) console/browser/Adobe Flash tier twin stick shooter with some of the laziest graphics ever to be pushed through Steam Direct. Also, given this advertisement only ever had a concurrent user count of 2 people interacting with it, we can see why the developer gave up... although one look at the product should be enough to deter anyone from thinking it would be okay to burn $100 to pollute the Steam store with it. But this isn't completely relevant because this is not Shapes & Shots, it's just an advertisment for it, so it's not correct to try to review that completely distinct product. We must instead review this for what it is... an advertisement. If you enjoy advertisements, you can consume them for free on the web or on Youtube without needing to add them to your game library, download them, and then launch the advertising. It's impossible in a general sense to recommend people should do that over playing real, full games on Steam, and that applies here with "Shapes & Shots - Prologue" too. Usually the purpose of these advertisements is to get you to shell out money to the developer to buy the full product, but the developer hasn't bothered actually making a product you can buy, leaving this as an advertisement for nothing. We must question what value this pointless advertising has for gamers... and the answer is "none". Due to the poor public response amongst gamers for this advertisement, it seems unlikely the developer will go on to make the full product. As an advertisement, this is only free in the same way that adverts on Youtube and banner ads in your browser are. This is a game demo that's been dumped on Steam to advertise another Steam store page in the hopes of raking in some cash. Just because advertisements are free, doesn't mean they're worth your time. It's important to understand there's a formal process to create a demo/page for a game which hasn't been followed here: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/demos While it might seem like an inocuous mistake, publishing demos and advertisements as if they are full games is misleading and in some ways harmful. This advertisement is taking up marketing space and visibility that would be better made available to a developer that's done the right thing and created a full game. Instead, that visibility is given over to a demo/advert that's been published incorrectly and is polluting the marketplace. It's unclear if this mistake was made through incompetence or a deliberate intent to mislead gamers. Often developers may choose to incorrectly publish demo/advertisements as separate games as a cheap way to bypass paying Valve for marketing presence on the Steam front page, which may seem clever to them, but it's harmful behaviour and it's not good for gamers. Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 2 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. Advertisements and incorrectly published demos don't add +1 to your game collector count, they aren't full games. It's impossible for me to recommend this incorrectly published advertising spam to gamers, you deserve better than adverts.