箱庭小駅伝2

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"箱庭小駅伝2" (Miniature Garden Relay Race 2) is a sports management game where you manage high school and college track events in Japan. The challenge to the game is getting over just how bad the implementation is... the game runs in a Window like it was written with Windows Forms or something, has a couple of primitive low poly assets but mostly it's just a spreadsheet. Now I know that's a big deal for Fantasy Football stuff, but this is way too niche and way too badly implemented to be appealing to anyone.

What do you do in the game? Just watch your spreadsheets, click around on a few cells and menus to organise atheletes... it's dry and it's bad.

There's no English translation for the game, but that's okay. The language of bad games is universal.

The game is really simple and unambitious in terms of implementation, more of a tech demo or one of those cases where an amateur developer spends $100 to publish something on Steam Direct to see if it's possible. Yes, obviously it's possible. A proof of concept, tech demo, or something that's less than a little blip on the radar isn't offering anything truly valuable to gamers.

The graphics aren't great, Mostly just text and some laughably poor low poly assets to attempt (and fail) at visualising the races. That's understandably a turn off for a lot of gamers, and it's a big contributor to the failure of the game to attract gamers despite having no up-front cost. Gaming is a primarily visual medium, and if developers want to succeed, they must understand that it's not an area for compromise. You deserve better than compromises.

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 only 13 concurrent 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?

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.

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