"Aard and Wyzz: The rise of minions" is not really a game, it's a demo/advertisement for an as-yet unreleased 2.5D/iso shooter/puzzle game with lightweight RPG elements, but it's not appropriate to talk about the product that this is advertising, because this is not that product (and that product may never even be made).

This has some really mediocre looking graphics that will understandably be 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 primarly visual medium, and if developers want to succeed, they must understand that it's not an area for compromise. You deserve better than compromises.

Insultingly, the developer insists that you should play this with a console peasant children's toy gamepad instead of KB+M. Developers should try to be aware which platform they're designing games for. It's the responsibility of the developer to ensure the game runs well on the platform they're selling it on, with the primary peripherals that PC gamers use.

This is only free in the same way that adverts on Youtube and banner ads in your browser are. This is a game demo that's been dumped on Steam to advertise another Steam store page in the hopes of raking in some cash. Just because advertisements are free, doesn't mean they're worth your time.

It's important to understand there's a formal process to create a demo/page for a game which hasn't been followed here:

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/demos

While it might seem like an inocuous mistake, publishing demos and advertisements as if they are full games is misleading and in some ways harmful. This advertisement is taking up marketing space and visibility that would be better made available to a developer that's done the right thing and created a full game. Instead, that visibility is given over to a demo/advert that's been published incorrectly and is polluting the marketplace.

It's unclear if this mistake was made through incompetence or a deliberate intent to mislead gamers. Often developers may choose to incorrectly publish demo/advertisements as separate games as a cheap way to bypass paying Valve for marketing presence on the Steam front page, which may seem clever to them, but it's harmful behaviour and it's not good for gamers.

Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 3 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?

Nope. This isn't worth downloading. While this didn't cost me any money up front, I still feel ripped off.