izigame.me

Awful new player experience, the game barely explains anything about the mechanics while also locking away most of your tools behind a terrible battlepass progression system that forces you to buy cosmetics in order to be able to actually unlock your core abilities, or to upgrade your peashooters into actually useable guns.
Sure maybe that could be excused if the core gameplay and mission design was good but that is not the case either, the objectives are all essentially chores you do; you spend about a minute doing boring objectives, the game spawns in a single wave of 10-20 enemies that you dispatch and then you go back to a minute of just no enemies being present while you do these mindnumbing objectives. The clearance levels are also just a baffling design choice, why would I ever just want to play 1/3rd or 2/3rd of a level instead of the whole level? But you are forced to play clearance 1 and 2 before you are allowed to play clearance 3 which means by the time you have unlocked the full mission you will have already gotten tired of replaying it.
The only redeeming quality would be the setting of Control, but the game is mostly just recycled assets from that game which means it basically has nothing new to present there either.

I'm genuinely at a complete loss at these unhinged negative comments. This is a stellar game. Yes, you get 5-6 jobs, at different clearance levels and different difficulties. But there's a million unlockables that don't need ANY MTX, and the DLC is cosmetic only. Not to mention the different kits and weapons you can use to vary up the experience, and generally just the experience of grouping up with others, leading to a different dynamic.
You can also ping points of the map - so although there's no chat, you can still communicate. It's not a massive loss in my opinion - though I suppose it'd be nice in non-invite games.
There's some connection issues though they're pretty temporary - and issues are addressed as quickly as possible. I trusted Remedy to provide a good experience, and the 2.5 hours I spent on it has told me all I need to know. That money is well-earned.
If you care about money-to-time ratio, then maybe this game isn't for you, YET. But if you care about literally anything else as well, then I suggest you at least give it a shot. At the very least try it, with good intentions. You won't regret it.
It's a damn good game. And it feels good to play.

Game is fun but definitely could use some more time cooking.
In this game, your gear is pretty simple. You have your Crisis Kit (which is this game's class system), your gun and grenade slot (which is not tied to your class), and your perk slots. The Crisis Kits come in three flavors, Fix Kit (you get a wrench), Jump Kit (you get an electric pusher tool thingy), and Splash Kit (you get a water cannon)
Weapon and kit progression (outside of perks) are tied to a free battle pass with cosmetics, meanwhile there is a separate premium battlepass just for cosmetics and sprays.
The gameplay loop is like Left 4 Dead, you run through the map, shoot hordes, and do the objectives. Occasionally the game will throw some elite mobs at you. There are Safe Houses scattered around the map that let you resupply, find currency (for unlocking battlepass/perks), and maybe a really strong gun that's temporary for that mission until you run out of ammo. Around the map will be resupply stations to replenish your ammo, and showers that can heal you and your teammate. There will be map hazards or broken down objects that can be solved (quickly) by one of the three Crisis Kits, like fires that can be put out by the Splash Kit, broken power supplies that can be fixed by the Fix Kit, or unpowered electrical equipment that can be charged by the Jump Kit. These things can be handled without the Crisis Kits but it will take much longer.
The cosmetics themselves are nice if you enjoy the firefighter theme with a Remedy twist. From an art standpoint, it's fantastic if you like the Remedyverse, and especially if you want to revisit the oldest house.
Objectives can be confusing to grasp, especially since there's no text or voice chat to communicate with teammates. Weapon/kit feedback is a bit lacking, (hard to tell jump kits charge state sometimes), and guns could use that extra oomph.
For the kits, it will be a bit confusing for new players to understand at first, especially if you're allergic to reading, but even then their descriptions don't paint the whole picture.
Take the Splash Kit for example. It's basically a water gun. What does water do in this game? The showers dotted around the map heal you, but the Splash Kit doesn't. In this game there is an element system, stay in water for too long and a gauge will fill, indicating how wet your are, the same idea goes for heat and electricity. The water gun allows you and your teammates to be "wet" so that heat hazards build up slower, and won't damage you as much. It can also be used to put out teammates that are on fire. It can ALSO be used to wet enemies, allowing someone with the Jump Kit to shock them, causing the electricity to spread between hordes of wet enemy and stun them.
Progression is simple.
You start with a free battlepass that has weapon/kit upgrades, and cosmetics/sprays. There's also a perk system separate from the battle pass. They share the same currency to unlock things, but perks can be upgraded with a couple of different currencies you earn through playing the game. These currencies you can pick up from several areas around the map or the final boss of the mission. There's also a separate battlepass on launch that only has cosmetics.
There's 5 missions, each separated into 3 parts. Initially you can only play the first part of the mission.
You unlock each part by replaying them. So the first part may take 5-10 minutes to complete, and then that allows you to play the mission again with the 1st and 2nd part, which will take a bit longer. Then finally, after that you can play the full mission length.
There's difficulty modifiers and "corruption" modifiers to tune how challenging you want to play.
So in the end, you will have control of how much time and how difficult you want to experience your sessions.
We can compare this structure to Left 4 Dead 2, which released with 6 campaigns on launch, and a difficulty slider. As of this review I have not played through the full length of all the missions yet nor at max difficulty + corruption modifiers to see how much they change up.
Final thoughts on this game, it definitely has some things it needs to iron out. Player onboarding can still be improved, and there are noticeable visual/sound bugs that can make it difficult to understand what's happening in the game. The lack of communication tools only adds on top of this. The tutorial messages in the main menu are busted if you're playing on an ultrawide resolution like 3440x1440. I'd also like to see some gameplay features added, like being able to swap my kit BEFORE I spawn into a mission when matchmaking. Ok you can swap on the elevator with K but they should just have the menu pop up before spawning.
In terms of monetization, it seems to be almost parallel with how Helldivers 2 handles theirs, but the difference is that there will always be a free gameplay battlepass, and a paid cosmetic battlepass released in future content updates.
tldr, i think the base gameplay is good. the monetization is fair, art is good.
just has some kinks to iron out with player onboarding, there should be a proper tutorial. the missions are fun to play through, could use more but that's coming down the line later this year.