Warning: In-Game Cash Shop[en.wikipedia.org]

This game is infested with a toxic mobile app style cash shop. You will be prompted to and expected to give money/credit card details to the developers through this cash shop to buy in-game goods so you can play the game.

Note: Dead PvP game
This game contains no meaningful single player content. There are no available servers and no player population. This game cannot be played as intended.

Return Alive is described as a free-to-play top-down tactical shooter, set in a world ravaged by a black fog. Because it's hard work to fill out a whole world when your only goal is to push a mobile app style cash shop at PC gamers. But there's just 1-2 players at most on any given day, possibly the developers, and the whole thing is headed to development hell.

So, Return Alive is a dead PvP game. Why did it fail? It's video game autopsy time!

Almost every PvP exclusive game on Steam fails. 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.

Otherwise the graphics are meh, the gameplay is worse, and the game format, top down shooting/brawling stuff... while Syndicate was a great game, that format is a legacy one in the era of full, immersive 3D first and third person games that dominate the market, and they dominate for a good reason.. they're better formats, objectively. Remember, they have to find a way to appeal to gamers here, and their only draw card seems to be their disgusting mobile app cash shop. While developers love them, gamers hate them.

So, despite not being able to finish the game, the developers apparently had all the time in the world to build that working cash shop microtransaction system and financial transaction back-end into the game. That shows the developers primary goal was just to set out to gouge cash from Steam gamers just like mobile devs do with mobile peasants.

Cash shop first, finish the game later... maybe? This kind of thing is harmful to the industry and to gamers.

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. While this didn't cost me any money up front, I still feel ripped off.