izigame.me

Imagine a restaurant game like "Cooking Mama" or "Overcooked", with the player racing to get fulfill orders for impatient customers, except instead of baking pizzas and cleaning dishes you're loading up fighter-bombers with ordinance and patching up battle-damaged V-22s. This is a unique and original take on a military strategy game with an emphasis on logistics, timing, and organization; like Slitherine & Every Single Soldier's Afghanistan and Vietnam games, it's kind of a "light milsim" experience where it shows a very non-arcade-y side of modern warfare while still being very easy to learn and enjoy. I also think the campaign is the best these folks have made, presenting a series of hypothetical missions with a clear narrative and escalating scale as you go from struggling for sea and air superiority to supporting a ground invasion.

I have 3 big nitpicks with the game:
1. Given that this is a fast-paced real-time game I really wish they had more hotkeys: several times I lost a mission just because I couldn't click on the arrow to launch the selected aircraft on the selected mission fast enough.

2. Pathfinding is very bad; I'm not sure if this is a bug or a deliberate design decision but if you tell two aircraft to go in opposite directions they will often choose the same path, bump nose-to-nose, stare at each other awkwardly for five minutes, and BOTH give up and go back to where they started. The game would be a lot less frustrating if they automatically re-routed or flipped a coin over who proceeds to their destination and who goes back to their starting slot, especially since there's no way to manually tell one aircraft to just take the long way around a row of parked jets.

3. Survival mode is really unbalanced, there are a lot of random events with no boon-penalty trade-off (like C-2 Greyhounds arriving derailing your whole game) or no way to address the problem with the resources given (like getting 2 x 2 amphibious assault missions when you only received 2 V-22s). I'd love to see an update where the C-2 Greyhound gives you some kind of reward (like "spare parts" reducing repair times) and the random enemy algorithm actually checks to see if it's even possible for a perfect player to handle what is being thrown at them (i.e. don't attack me with 2 carriers requiring 10 fighters total when you know I only have my 8 starting fighters): otherwise Survival Mode is just a miserable process of hitting "restart" every time you get shafted by the RNG.

Definite recommend if you like carriers, micromanagement games, working under pressure, and organising stuff. Some levels are really easy, and some will require you to play them multiple times to get them right. Plus the OST is nice, and I like the background radio chatter.

However, there is one fly in the ointment: the 'damage' mechanic. I'm not sure how it happens, but sometimes, aircraft get back to the carrier in a damaged state. If you fly them out again, they'll crash and you'll need to send a SAR Seahawk to recover the crew. The only way to fix them is to move them below-decks to the hangar for a period of 30 seconds (approximately).

This entire mechanic sounds neat, but in the heat of combat, with every single airframe mattering, it can be a real ball-ache to find out that you need an additional Super Hornet to deal with the approaching enemy ship, no worries, one of the Super Hornets are returning to the carrier, time to re-arm it and send it off, ONLY YOU DON'T, because RNG has struck at the worst possible time and your only available Super Hornet is damaged. So you have to pick between permanently losing an airframe for the rest of the mission AND sending out a SAR mission, OR not get that Super Hornet fixed and in the air in time and getting your carrier damaged.

Yeah, no. Screw that noise. I HATE this mechanic. Once I finished the game I immediately downloaded a mod that removes this mechanic and the gameplay was SO much smoother. You can get it for free on Nexusmods.

Lastly, for some reason, you can only have three active missions at a time. So if you have two refueling missions, good luck getting all the ACTUAL combat sorties in.

Other than THAT nonsense, this game is great. 7/10.

When it comes to recommending this game, I’ve quite struggled with the decision and ultimately landed on a “no”, but it’s not without its merits, in fact if it would just be fixed up a little it might be really good.
The Good: At its core, this is a really fun and challenging game. The difficulty curve is steep, especially in the early levels, but that’s part of its charm. When you struggle through a tough stage only to breeze through it later, the sense of improvement is incredibly satisfying. The later levels crank up the challenge even more, pushing you to earn every victory—and man, does it feel good when you finally nail them. There’s a rewarding sense of progression here that keeps you hooked.
The Bad: Despite the fun, two major flaws drag it down. First, the repair/breakdown mechanic is a mess—poorly thought out and frustratingly inconsistent. Take Mediterranean-3 as an example: you’ve got a Chinook inbound, followed by a rapid-fire sequence of Amphibious tasks a bit after. It’s stressful but manageable—until your Chinook comes back damaged. There’s no time to repair and re-arm it, so you’re forced to send it out still damaged anyway. If it crashes (and the chance of that is definitely higher than I wish it was), say goodbye to your 5-star rating. It’s pure luck, not skill (at least in this scenario), and critical aircraft should be immune to this nonsense in their key levels. Second, the bugs are a nightmare. I had to replay the entire game twice because a completed level mysteriously “uncompleted” itself, triggering a domino effect that unwound my progress all the way to the end. Which isn't a huge problem for me since I like the game, but it's incredibly frustrating when you're so close to having all stars just for it to say "nope" at the very end.
Edit:
Correction: Apparently you're supposed to have 3 Chinooks coming in, in that level, but apparently my game bugged out there, but my point still stands about the mechanic still stands
I really hope the new Game will capture the charm of this one, while also addressing the problems this one had for me. Have a good day everyone