When it comes to gaming on Windows, Valve’s Steam marketplace is the king of the land. Today, Facebook decided it wanted to pick a fight, and it’s set its sights on squarely on Steam with a new standalone game client called Gameroom.
Gameroom has the look and feel of a Steam competitor, with a familiar layout that lets you browse games by category and a library for all the games you already have downloaded. It’s a lot like EA’s Origin and Ubisoft’s UPlay clients, only Facebook’s Gameroom is populated largely by the kinds of free-to-play games that have become commonplace on the social network.
Unfortunately, even some of the “best” games on Gameroom are simple desktop ports of mobile games, with controls and visuals that are far less impressive than they might have seemed on your smartphone. Puzzle games, word puzzles, and trivia challenges translate beautifully, but shooters and action games in particular tend to look absolutely atrocious on a computer monitor as opposed to the tiny phone display they were originally designed for.
Simply put, Gameroom is just a separate app for all of the—mostly annoying and not worth your time—games that you see in the little Facebook ads on your timeline. There’s a few gems in there, but it’s probably not a reason to bother with a completely separate app, when you can just as easily play them right on Facebook or, better yet, on your phone.
