DATAFLOW Reviews

I picked this game up for $4.99 after laughing pretty hard. I work as an IT engineer in the DevOps realm for a living so it's always entertaining to me to see games that try to market themselves at tech people (whether or not that is their real aim). The truth is that for every successful "tech" game out there, there's an engineer like me that's screaming out "NO." Where to begin with this game? I only played for 15 minutes and had a third of the content completed. It's pretty bad. You play a SysAdmin who is helping a friend protect their network against viruses and the like. Why you have to do this with a point-and-click sidescrolling game, I don't know. What I do know is that as a person in this industry, it kinda makes my entire profession look like a joke which doesn't really bode well for the developers. It felt like an insult to an entire profession. Whatever. The gameplay centers around clicking on bad things as they emerge and move from the right side of the screen to the left side of the screen. You need to avoid clicking on the good things to optimize points. It's really that simple and looks/feels like a flash game from the early 2000s. So here's my short synopsis for a really short game that is overpriced for what I received: [b]The Good:[/b][list][*]The concept is.... fascinating?[*]The game play is... functional?[/list][b]The Bad: [/b][list][*]No full-screen mode. Because the game only requires a mouse to play, I frequently found myself clicking outside of the application box which pauses the game and throws it into the background. In the industry, we would call this bad UI/UX.[*]ALL YOUR SPELLING ERRORS ARE BELONG TO THEM. Jesus Christ in a handbag, there are so many spelling and grammar errors in this game. It's so bad, I can't tell if it's intentional/meant to satirize the typical "user" or if the developers of this game don't have access to a spell check for their copy. Either way, it annoyed the crap out of me for so many reasons that I don't want to get into here.[*]The music starts out pretty decent but then you realize there's only like three songs that you are hearing on repeat. The repeat is poor as well. It has a notable skipped second where it loops back on itself. It disjoints the entire experience to me.[/list][b]The Ugly:[/b][list][*]Spending $4.99 for less than an hour of gameplay. Yeeesh.[/list][b]Summary:[/b][list][*]If you find this game on the Steam Summer sale for under a dollar and want to see how NOT to make an entertaining game, go for it. Otherwise, just don't.[/list]