izigame.me

I genuinely want to know what happened during the year this game was taken offline only for it to come back in a worse state than in Beta. I have poured in a decent amount of hours into this game and honestly enjoyed it a lot. I was slightly disappointed when it went offline, but was optimistic that the game would return better than ever. However now that the game has returned, I am extremely disappointed in the state that it is in. There are a few areas that I wanna touch on and would like to see improvements in.
Gameplay - This game feels worse to play than in Beta. Countless people have commented about this, the speed, the zoomed in camera, the hitboxes, it all feels worse to play. I don’t think this game will ever feel as good as it did in the Beta, but whatever this did to this game in the full release feels like a step in the wrong direction. Also, why is there no ranked mode in the full release when the Beta had it? The new big mode for the launch was the rifts, an all new experience for players. I personally find rifts to be very boring. I don’t want to hate on them too much, I like the idea of them. I think it’s a good idea to have a mode other than online pvp, and the boss battles seem like a really fun addition to the game. However, it all feels so lackluster, the gameplay of this game isn’t good enough or satisfying that I would want to fight through AI battles over and over again for some small rewards. The mini-game in the rifts are also really boring. Again, I don’t think it’s a bad idea, but I feel like something similar to Smash Bros Break The Targets or other side modes would be a better fit. Something that actually utilizes the characters and their movesets and not “Jump Rope”. In addition, if someone would want to complete the rifts, they would have to replay each on a grand total of 5 times, once on each difficulty. This honestly doesn’t feel like a fun new mode, it just feels like a chore. On top of this in order to fully complete the rifts, you need someone else to play with you as there is always a multiplayer mission on each of the stages. I feel like this wouldn’t be such an issue if rifts supported local multiplayer, but it doesn’t for whatever reason. I also find it strange that there is on offline play whatsoever. The Beta had offline play, so what is the purpose of removing it? I personally play this game on a Steam Deck, in the past I would have loved to take it along with me to play with friends without the need of the internet, but now I can’t? I just don’t get it.
Monetization - I get that this game is free to play and the team has to make money somehow, but dear lord this game has some of the worst monetization I've seen. Back in the days of the Beta, you could unlock perks and characters using coins which you could get simply by playing the game. With the full release, the team decided to remove the gold completely for 2 new currencies for these unlockables. There are a number of players who purposefully waited to spend their gold for new characters with the full release, but since gold was removed, all the progress they have made has basically been wasted in exchange for an in-game banner. On top of this, it is also significantly harder to unlock new characters as to get this new fighter currency you have to do missions, play rifts, and use other characters from crumbs of this currency. This forces players to continuously come back into the game in the hopes of one day unlocking a single character out of a roster of 26 unlockable characters. We also have the skins in the game, which a grand majority of them can only be purchased with the premium, purchasable currency known as Gleamium. In-game cosmetics have always been a thing, and in the Beta I didn’t really mind them all that much. Sure they seemed overpriced to me, but at the end of the day it was an optional purchase you could make if you wanted. However, with the full release of the game, we have a new way to categorize all the characters and skins, an example of these being the summer skins having a beach tag associated with them along with the tag for whatever series that character is from. This should NOT be an issue, but for whatever reason, they decided to lock certain missions behind these tags, which means if you want to complete certain missions or even certain levels in the rifts, you would first have to unlock that character AND purchase a skin for that character to complete a mission. There is no excuse to lock missions behind specific characters to begin with, but to lock them behind skins as well? This feels like a slap in the face to all players and is by far one of the greediest decisions I have seen a company make. The cherry on top of this burnt cake, is the last currency, the Prestige currency. As of now, the only way to unlock the Prestige currency is by buying skins using Gleamium. This basically rewards those who make poor decisions on how they spend their money with cosmetics that can ONLY be obtained using Prestige. The new Batman Who Laughs skin is really cool, but to lock it behind those who spend large amounts of money is insulting.
The UI - This game looks like a mobile game. I do not understand why the devs decided to change how it looks, but it is so much worse than before. It feels so much worse to navigate, having things that lead you to all different areas, it’s all just confusing. Also the removal of the end of game stats is just plain dumb. There is no reason to remove these things
I don’t want to completely hate this game, I am just frustrated by how things played out. I eagerly awaited for the relaunch, but seeing this game in this state is just sad. I also don’t want to hate on Player First Games, I know that they can make a good game because they already did it with the Beta. I want to have fun while playing this game, and I urge Player First Games to listen to your community. I have seen those who are very dedicated to this game, I was one of them, but a lot of people are also let down by the full release. I know some of my problems are being addressed and that’s great, please keep it up or at least address some of the bigger issues though. In terms of the monetization, I don’t know if this was a decision by the dev team or Warner Bros, but I ask you sincerely to push back some of the monetization in this game. At the very least unlocking characters should not be the equivalent of working a full time job. I don’t think if they went the Brawlhalla route on this would be a bad idea, allowing players to spend $20 to unlock all current and future characters. What I do think will happen if the current unlock method is kept is that this game is headed for failure because most people won’t want to spend the time and/or money to scrape by a game that is not fun to play only to be treated like garbage for not spending the money