Note: Dead PvP game
This game contains no meaningful single player content. There are barely any available servers and insufficient player population. This game almost certainly be played as intended at any given time, and will be devoid of players in 3-4 months.

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.

This is an incredibly lame and essentially dead PvP ripoff of Fall Guys/Stumbleguys only worse in all respects and with a toxic mobile app cash shop. The servers are junk and you can wait up to 30 minutes just to log on, and when you do, there's probably not enough players for a match anyway. This will be completely dead in 3-4 months.

So, "Nexus Rumble: The Ultimate Showdown" 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.

I'm not sure if this is an asset flip, but it's one of those cases where the assets just look much better than the rest of the quality of the game... a glaring inconsistency. Some of the assets look legit (the characters, for example, look like garbage), but some don't. There's no evidence, but as always, the biggest problem with asset flips besides the plagiarism is the deplorably low quality of the other aspects of the game, and even if the game assets are genuinely created for the game, the quality of the rest of the game is indistinguishable from that of asset flips.

On the important matter of pricing and value for gamers, there's a lot going on here with monetisation, so this really shouldn't be considered a truly free product because of that.

There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $1 USD for this.

Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It seems like a nice gesture for the game to have no up-front cost anymore, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product. This is also a bit of a slap in the face to anyone who showed enough questionable judgement to pay money for this... nobody got refunded.

It doesn't stop there, as mentioned, this game is also infested with mobile app store like microtransactions. This is a consumer hostile model that we don't need to see on PC. It's deceptively priced to gouge gamers, and that's a reason in itself to avoid this.

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. I didn't pay money, but I still feel ripped off.

Developer Response!

The developer has weighed in to inform everyone they didn't read the Developer Usage Rules for Steam "partners", or they deliberately ignored the part where Valve says:

Though it may be tempting, not every review needs to be responded to. A developer response will frequently draw more attention than the original statement, potentially turning a small issue into a much larger community discussion. It's also not a good idea to use this feature to refute customer opinions. Your direct attention can be seen as validation or a defensive attempt to silence your customers.

The developers response is bizarre and also untruthful in just about everything he says. Let's break it down, because it's weird, and also gamers have a right to know when developers are dishonest and misleading, which is the case here, as you'll see.

The developer goes off on a wierd tangent about the game being P2W, I never once in my review said that it was. What a bizarre and misleading misrepresentation. Regardless, gamers view nasty cash shops as toxic, which is why I clearly re-iterate the Steam store page warning about the in-app transactions. Did the developer somehow think nasty cash shops were okay, and something gamers like? I doubt it. Guilty conscience being triggered, perhaps.

The developer laughably lies... seriously, the developer wants you to believe that putting a price on something does not mean that the developer wants any money. What a bizarre and utterly untrue statement, clearly dishonest, clearly misleading, and clearly a lie. People don't monetize things they don't want money for.

Finally, the developer of this train wreck demands that my review instruct them on how to make video games, because they obviously don't know, looking at this dismal failure of this product.

There is no obligation for reviews to be constructive. Reviews are not written to teach developers how to make games. They should know this before they release products on Steam. If they don't, why does this have to be a problem for gamers?

Video game reviews are to inform gamers on their decisions around which games to buy, download, or spend their time playing. They are not meant to be tutorials for failed developers.

The developers attitude is appalling, and this is why Valve sets guidelines to prevent this kind of misuse of the developer response feature.

Nothing in the developers pointless breach of Valve guidelines changes any of the objective facts of my review. My review stands unaltered. I cannot recommend this failed game to anyone.