▼ Not recommended
1 hrs
Warning: Asset Flip!
NeverSynth is a Digital Homicide style asset flip, or what Valve calls a "Fake Game". The "developer" paid for/pirated a few Unreal Marketplace packs, dumped them all in a blender, and submitted it to Valve as if they're real game developers.
Two notable criteria for what makes an asset flip instead of legitimate use of stock assets are whether those assets comprise the majority of the game, and whether the "developer" properly credited the people who created most of the assets in the game. This game fails both of those tests. The "developers" here didn't credit any of the artists and real, actual game developers who created the assets here, so this is plagiarism, as well as cash grab shovelware.
In this case, the asset flipper took a neon "synthwave" backdrop, some stolen music, and some stolen car assets (most of the cars are from the Free UE4 Automotive Scene pack), and dumped them onto a barebones/basic endless runner template. All you do in this "game" is flip between lanes and avoid objects, it's shallower than Temple Runner on the iPhone. It has no value or merit as a real game.
Whale Rock Games have a known history of trying to scam people into paying them money for someone else's work, through this account or through closely linked/alt accounts. One example of Whale Rock Games doing this is PolyClassic: Wild, which is really the "POLYGON - Western Pack" asset, written by the actual developers, Synty Studios.
Taking this shovelware seriously as if it was a genuine attempt to make a game, it doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
While there's a few graphics options, you can't set the game resolution... this is a bizarre thing to miss, but the Russian scammers at Whale Rock don't really care about that kind of stuff anyway. They're not real developers, this is not a genuinely made product, it's an asset flip cash grab.
The game features lazy low-polygon "retro" assets (except for all the stolen car assets, anyway), making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the 1990s. It's unclear why the developers weren't able to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets for the game, and also irrelevant... what matters is that this looks bad as a result of their decisions, a compromise PC gamers shouldn't have to put up with.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
In an attempt to excuse the low quality of delivery here, the game makes a big point of having a nice soundtrack. If the business plan for a game is to compete with Spotify, which is free and has effectively unlimited music, all of which is better than the music here, it's failed before it even started. Gamers can listen to the Spotify for free. A game cannot be seen as recommendable just because it competes badly with listening to the radio or to MP3s.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 9 players, and the worst part is these weren't genuine players, these were the Russian fake review accounts that the developer paid to make the fake reviews. Since the fake reviews are all done, now the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
Warning: Review Manipulation!
This game features a HUGE number of fake positive reviews from accounts known to be in the business of review manipulation/paid reviews. They're all written in either Russian or broken English, appear at almost exactly the same time, very shortly after the game launched on Steam, all have a direct Steam purchase of the game, and the accounts are used consistently to write fake reviews for asset flips and other cash grabs/scams. The "Positive" review score on this game should be disregarded due to this blatant, unethical review manipulation. This is done to deceive and scam gamers into paying for a bad product.
This kind of asset flipping isn't harmless. It makes it harder for gamers to find genuinely made games from ethical developers. It makes it harder for genuine indie developers, who put hard work into trying to make real games, to find an audience for their products. It gives indie developers a bad name.
So, should you buy this asset flip? Is this better than any of the 100,000+ genuinely made games on Steam? Of course not!
NeverSynth has the comically over-optimistic price of around $10 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the unethical nature of the developer.
Profile Features Limited!
Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.
79 found helpful
Steam ↗
