Imagine all of your favorite games, but worse.
Core is a great game to play if you’re the type of person who looks at what’s on the market and thinks “modern games suck, they have too much polish and aren’t greedy enough.” Do you want games whose awful netcode mimics playing on dial-up? Do you want the kind of counterfeit quality you’d expect from Wish.com? Does the thought of spending time and effort on development offend you? Do you want a game that will be viciously defended by children bitter that their parents won’t buy them Fortnite skins or the latest Call of Duty?
Do I have the game for you.
Core is Roblox but on the Unreal engine. It is a collection of barely-functioning mini-games advertised on the fact that the games are built by the community and you can very quickly swap between them. From a functional perspective, Core exists to serve two purposes. To provide a landscape where budding programmers can get inspired and learn to create games, and as a money siphon for unattended children.
Before I go any further I’d like to note that the people who use Core as a stepping stone to making games have my complete support. There are a lot of developers who started out in Roblox, and to have that experience in an ecosystem where your creations can better find an audience and maybe even earn some income? That’s pretty awesome. I support passionate indie developers with every fiber of my being.
What really ticks my clock about the games in Core isn’t so much the quality but the entitlement and predatory nature shown by a lot of the creators in proportion to said quality. For example, there’s a game that rips off the My Hero Academia brand and calls itself “Hero Academia” featuring art ripped off from the property. The game itself is a pretty mediocre fighter, but get this. The creator sells a starter pack, a $10/month VIP subscription, and in-game currency for real money. Not only that, but the game sells spins for limited powers. For a creation that might have half an hour of content.
A real up-and-coming Bobby Kotick here preying on children.
So while the quality of games found on Core virtually all fall into the realm of “worse than pretty much anything you’d find on Steam” I’m not going to sit here and nitpick the shoddy work of amateurs. I am however going to call out the horrible attempts at devious, predatory monetization that a lot of creators are pushing with their titles. To take advantage of children, because I don’t believe it’ll be mostly adults playing this crap.
You see I can go on Steam and find some marble rolling game for less than a dollar that’ll give me a few hours of fun. You know what that game isn’t going to sell me? Currency multipliers plus a monthly subscription.
The games are chock full of currency multipliers, currency bundles, boosts, subscriptions, cosmetics (that the creators for the most part did not create, I should note, they siphoned them from a free asset store), all sorts of garbage monetization shoved into a game that ostensibly is geared toward suckering children out of money and uses a confusing currency system similar to the old Xbox points so people are never quite mindful of what they are really spending.
As a free to play game, Core is full of titles you’ll walk away from thinking “I could have spent that time on something more useful”. For the kids it’s more like “my mom won’t buy me Halo, but this barely functioning multiplayer game kinda looks like Halo.” Most of these games wouldn’t sell a single copy if they were thrown up on the Steam store for more than a dollar, so the fact that the creators are digging for AAA-tier microtransactions is as nonsensical as it is offensive.
The crap someone threw together in a few afternoons made of free Unreal assets shouldn’t be asking for the same kind of monthly subscription that Final Fantasy XIV does, plus a $20 starter pack, plus cosmetics, plus boosts, plus currency, plus whatever else the creator wants to throw a price tag on with no effort of their own.
Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.
MMO Fallout 