"Super Helmets on Fire DX Ultra Edition Plus Alpha" is one of literally thousands of retro 2D platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere... and I'm not kidding. Searching for "platformers" on the Steam store page yields over 17,000 results! Is this one of the best of those? Absolutely not.

This almost comes across as a joke game, but it is a "serious" (and seriously low quality) 2D endless runner platformer where you blend action and combat with endlessly running towards the right side of your screen. And that's all there is to it... this is 10 years old but plays worse than 30+ year old platformers like Super Mario Bros.

In the modern era of high quality bleeding edge PC gaming, these kinds of flat, lazy, lackluster platformers just don't cut it. Platforming is a dead genre for a reason. Even though this is "free", it failed to attract any interest for gamers here on Steam Direct for obvious reasons.

This looks a lot like it was designed for consoles, but released on Steam instead by mistake. While this is on PC, it has all the hallmarks and deficiencies of a console game, from the clunkier than needed control scheme to the less than cutting edge graphics. There's 10's of thousands of PC games on Steam, and PC gamers deserve only the best. This might not appeal to many gamers due to the lack of PC-centric design. It's unclear why this never made it to the video game console appliances it seems to have been designed for.

The amateur pixelcrap visual presentation here at best could have been an attempt to use "retro" as a crutch, a weak excuse to avoid admitting the developer wasn't capable of doing the job of a game developer this decade and creating cutting edge, high quality 3D visuals. While a lack of skill or funding is the explanation for this failure, it's no excuse. The end result of this incompetence is a game that looks dramatically inferior to professionally developed games. Terraria and Undertale succeeded despite looking crap, not because they look crap.

This game is ancient, it's over 10 years old... it's heavily dated and isn't going to give you a remotely contemporary gaming experience... another reason for gamers to be hesitant about adding this to their libraries.

Let's talk about pricing and the actual value this has for gamers.

There's no initial download price, but the developer was charging $2 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.

In terms of player counts and popular reception, this couldn't even crack 100 players at its absolute peak. For a free game on a platform with 130 million players, that is a spectacular failure, mostly due to the reasons I've supplied here.

Since free games don't contribute to your game collector badge and other profile stuff, is this a worthwhile addition to your Steam library?

This isn't good enough for me to suggest PC gamers spend their time and hard drive space on. There's thousands of better alternatives on Steam more worthy of your time.