Three years into an abandoned borderline scam.
It’s been three years since the early access launch of Identity, a game I would personally consider to be on a level of delusions of grandeur only shared by someone like Jason Appleton of Greedmonger or Tanner Rozankovic of CapitalGamingRP. A sandbox game, Identity launched into early access with nothing but a dream and a town square module you can walk around in and do nothing else. Other than $187 thousand Canadian. But in the last three years, surely the folks at Asylum Entertainment have added something into the game. Anything.
Nah. Not really.
Identity at this stage is effectively a big ol’ scam, a conceptual prototype that has nothing of value to offer anyone except for some drama gaming YouTubers. The last post from the team on Twitter is from May 31, and as most developers we talk about here it’s telling people to stick around for the big announcements coming out. The game itself meanwhile has not had an update since 2019, putting it squarely in MMO Fallout’s abandonware list.
539 reviews bring together a 25% ‘mostly negative’ rating on Steam, and that percentage should really be lower as many of the positive reviews are pretty openly sarcastic in their tone. I made this same comment in terms of CapitalGamingRP and the game Civil Contract (incidentally a very similar game to Identity), but I’ll repeat it here.
Assuming the developers pull a miracle out of their rear end and put out an update providing real gameplay, they still have a massive uphill battle of repairing the game and company’s image after they spent the last two years carrying the reputation of an abandoned scam. It means convincing people to buy into a $30 game that has been absolutely destroyed both in its forum posts and reviews, and has virtually nothing but negative publicity surrounding its existence. I wouldn’t wish that task on my worst enemy, and I’ve wished that on my worst enemy.
If you’re looking for a game to spend $30 on, you can’t get much worse of an investment than Identity in its current state or its reasonable potential for a future state. From a consumer-focused standpoint, there’s no reason to buy into the game with an expectation that a functional product will ever be made available, let alone one capable of standing on a healthy community. It doesn’t go on sale and player numbers fluctuate between 0 and 2 concurrent users at any given time.
MMO Fallout 