Zero Hour

[quote][b]Note: Dying PvP game[/b] This is a PvP focused game, but only a handful of players remain. The player base is too small to provide the variety the game was designed around, and at this rate it will be completely dead within months. It's extremely difficult to find a match. This game cannot be played as originally intended.[/quote] This is basically Rainbow Six Seige from Temu... remember R6 Siege? That's where Ubislop took the beloved Rainbow Six Clancy franchise and gutted it. They removed all the single player planning, strategy and co-op and replaced it with a toxic MTX infested PvP crapfest "live service" disaster... abandoning PC gamers in the search for hundreds of dollars in MTX money from console peasants they hoped to poach from Call of Duty. Appalling to see great game franchises die, isn't it? Well, this is worse than R6 by a million miles... apart from just being R6 but worse in terms of gameplay and polish. The developers mismanaged the community, there's toxicity, teamkilling without penalty, and uncontrolled cheating. That's certainly one of the factors behind this dying that we'll explore. And dying it is. I wasn't able to get a match in my region, during peak hour, despite quite a long wait. You probably won't get one either. So, "Zero Hour" is a practically dead PvP game. Why did it fail? It's video game autopsy time! [i]Most PvP games on Steam fail.[/i] Very few of them ever go viral. This game failed because the developer expected it to become "virally" popular without creating any actual reason or compelling features. This doesn't do anything that other games already do better. There's fierce competition in the PvP game arena... and I'm not referring to players fighting other players. There's thousands of PvP-only games but only a tiny handful of them are successful enough to attract and keep a wide player base. This game failed to compete and didn't get enough people to stay active. Despite being free, it did not have what it takes, it's as simple as that. This game lacks any meaningful solo content. The developer tried to use other players as a substitute for real work like level design and story, gambling that just because their game exists, it's going to magically pull the entire player base of Counter-Strike 2 over to this failure instead. They lost that unwise gamble. A game with no players and no solo content is a dead game. Developers need to stop relying on players as a substitute for real content, just because they feel creating genuine narrative, level design and so on is "too hard". On the upside, the game does feature customisable controls and resolution, so at least some of the basic, minimum requirements have been met. Unfortunately there's a number of other technical defects and shortcomings which contribute to the game being difficult to recommend to gamers. The graphics in this game are really quite good, which at least makes the game look more appealing. And while it's vital for any game to have impressive visuals (gaming is a visual medium, after all), there's more to a game than just the graphics. To be worth a gamers time and money, the game must match top tier visuals with top tier gameplay, and that's not happening here. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. Now on to pricing and value for gamers. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 140,000+ games on Steam? Zero Hour has the ridiculous, laughable price of $15 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games. For comparison, the $15 asking price for this game could get you games like "Remnant: From The Ashes", "Phantasmophobia" or "Dead Cells". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this. There's an additional $32 in cosmetic DLC available on top of the $15 USD purchase price. Selling cosmetics separately is the kind of thing that was invented for consoles and mobile phones, but here it is on Steam, too, the appalling microtransaction economy that gamers despise. It's not P2W, but I think it's important when developers are needlessly greedy. Zero Hour has the completely insane price of $15 USD, which is incredibly suspicious, higher than AAA pricing for an asset flip shovelware scam game. Why would the "developer" put such a high price tag on an asset flip with no true value as a game? There's no direct proof for this, but it's entirely possible this game is priced this way for money laundering or other criminal purposes. Higher prices allow more money to move with fewer transactions. Valve have previously banned developers for running money laundering scams. While there's no direct evidence in this case, it's highly suspicious and gamers should be wary. Ethics aside, there's enough defects and quality problems with this game that it's not worth recommending to gamers, but the unethical nature of the developer/their associates makes it completely impossible.