[quote][b]Note: Dead PvP game[/b]
This game contains no meaningful single player content. There are no available servers and no player population. This game cannot be played as intended.[/quote]
This laughably unfortunately named PvP arena shooter has nothing to do with what the title suggests, and instead is just a painfully generic Counter-Strike ripoff with flipped assets, zero creativity, and no players. I mean... did they even try to bring anything new to the table here? Nope. Believe it or not, it's not abandoned quite yet, but it's deep in development hell, and the only person spending time on this is the developer. No players, dead game.
So, Trans Ops - Transitional Operations is a dead PvP game. Why did it fail? It's video game autopsy time!
[i]Almost every PvP exclusive game on Steam fails.[/i] Only a tiny proportion of them "go viral". This game failed for many of the same reasons those others fail. The chief of which is the developer thinking that their game will "go viral" without actually creating any reason for it do so.
Competition amongst PvP centric games is extreme, and there's only a finite player base to appeal to. This game failed to reach any kind of critical mass and died as a result. Let's go into some of the reasons this particular game failed to appeal to gamers, despite the zero up front cost.
First and foremost, there's no meaningful single player content. The developer gambled that other players would be an acceptable substitute for adding storytelling, level design etc to the Game. They lost that bet.
Without a huge community of players or single player content to add a lasting value to the game, the game dies.
Developers must learn that other players are not an acceptable substitute for adding content to a game.
The game graphics look better than you might expect, but that's just because it looks like some or all of them are "borrowed" from asset stores or wherever. Gamers can tell... and it comes across as insincere.
There's also the old adage that those who lack the budget and talent to make their own game assets usually lack the budget and talent to do the rest of the job of game development properly, too.
On pricing, this is "free" enough, at least you won't be expected to spend any more money after you download this (actually rare for these kinds of games, so some kudos to the developer, but maybe he just didn't work out how to do look crates yet), 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.
Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 13 concurrent players, that just happened once, and now there are no players... 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?
Nope. This isn't worth downloading. There's no financial cost up-front, but you'd still be spending your time and a little hard drive space on a product that's far from the best. There's thousands of better 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.
The developer tacitly admits they stole other people's game assets to create this garbage.
The developer levels personal attacks against this reviewer, simply because they are angry with the facts related in my review for a bad product. This anger and hate is a coping mechanism when the developer is forced to face the truth about their failure... nobody wanted this garbage for obvious reasons. And now we know just why... the developer supplies direct reasons this should never have been published on Steam (they did so anyway because they are The Main Character).
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.
The developer wants you to know they "learned a lot" by publishing garbage on Steam Direct where nobody wanted it. That really hammers home the point... this is Steam, for gamers, it's not for incompetent developers who have no idea what they are doing to dump garbage homework assignments onto Steam just to "learn" anything... developers should know what they're doing before [b]anything[/b] else.
Polluting Steam with garbage from developers who now apparently admit they are unqualified and unfit to publish products they know aren't good enough for Steam hurts everyone, and it gives amateur developers an even worse name.
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.
