Stellar Stroll

"Stellar Stroll" is an unabashed, lazy ripoff of Asteroids (Copyright Atari Inc, 1979). Many lazy "amateur" developers don't pay attention to their obligations under copyright law, and often steal the ideas of actual, real game developers without credit, such as the "developer" here has done. Putting aside the unethical intellectual, creative and moral bankruptcy of stealing someone else's game concept, this is also breaking that unwritten law of stealing other people's game ideas... you should at least try to do better than the game you're ripping off. "Stellar Stroll" is considerably worse than Asteroids. The game here, such as it is, is of a pretty low technical standard. The implementation is basic and comes across as threadbare, more like a 'weekend project' rather than a commercial release. 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. There's a minor "plot" tacked on... something about a spacefaring dog, and a couple of additional mechanics like docking and so on, but at the end of the day this is just a poor ripoff of Atari's Asteroids copyright and offers nothing new or interesting to gamers. On the topic of visuals, the weak looking 2D retro assets seem like they'd be more at home in a browser game or a mobile app. 3D graphics accelerators hit the mainstream of PC gaming in the mid 1990's with cards like the ATI Rage and Voodoo3D, there's no excuse for such poor 2D graphics in 2025. That alone is enough to disqualify this for recommendation. Now on to pricing and value for gamers. This is "free" enough (not every "free" game in the "free" section is truly free, there's usually some hidden price tag), at least you won't be expected to spend any more money after you download this, but just because something is free doesn't mean it's good, and the cost of a game is more than just financial, your time is valuable too. 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. Given that this free title won't increase your game collector count, is it worth your time to add it to your library? This is 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.