izigame.me

Starting off by saying that before the latest round of updates, I could not be more enthusiastic about this game. I love the base premise of a combination tower defense/city builder, with super granular building. Figuring out optimal building methods that are structurally sound, and interlock in ways where they can support themselves even as parts of the foundations are destroyed, while also leaving enough space for increasingly large units and tactical boost pieces is a super rewarding challenge. Planning out towering housing complexes to optimize oxygen production on the roofs, add maximize add-on building bonus, while still needing viable and accessible paths creates fantastically weird and organic-feeling cities. Trying to expand outwards and gather resources while balancing your ability to defend them, and your more central city, is a fun exercise in strategic placement and resource/unit management.
The in-progress campaign is currently short, but promising, with a decently engaging story, and hints at a new environment with new strategic challenges. In the meantime, the endless mode was a fun way to continue playing, experiment, and expand past the short missions to try and create an ever-growing city. It made up for the discrepancy in value while waiting for a complete campaign.
Edit: After a recent hotfix and some developer updates, I'm cautiously optimistic again and updating my review. There's been a lot of rebalancing of the resource gathering mechanics, and at the time of my original review, they'd released an update that completely removed a warehouse mechanic that served as a waypoint to ferry resources from distant recourse nodes, since warehouses could theoretically be overused/exploited. The result had felt extremely punishing, and any in-progress games (particularly the endless mode) ended up with very broken economies. The devs have since listened to community feedback, and re-implemented the mechanic with a much higher cost, which feels like a logical compromise, alongside some other balancing. Having played around for a few more hours after the hotfix in both endless and a new skirmish, resource gathering still feels kind of slow and arduous, but significantly better than it did after the update. Personally it still feels like a steeper challenge than I'd consider ideal, and it really slows down how much you can build (which is by far the most fun part), but the developer response feels promising moving forward in early access.

TLDR: Super fun concept and mechanics, but the campaign is currently pretty short, and balancing updates have made the other game modes a lot more sluggish and tedious. The bones of the game are fantastic, but early access updates have caused the difficulty to fluctuate pretty dramatically. If you're really excited by the idea of a city builder that has super granular construction, building your walls brick by brick and jenga-ing your structures together, it's worth picking up. If you want a balanced resource economy and tower defense, maybe wait for a sale, or until the game comes out of early access.

Original review re: Update 3
But that brings me to the update. One of the most interesting resource gathering mechanics was a warehouse that acted as a waypoint for resources. It personally felt well balanced, as they are quite high in cost to build, so it encouraged strategic building of resource gathering hubs, so you could access clusters of distant resources. The latest update completely removed this mechanic, making resource gathering incredibly frustrating and punishing for any larger settlement, notably anything you might do in endless mode. It's rendered several games I had in progress unplayable. The dev feedback claims this was to avoid an 'exploit' and that other changes they made compensate for it. In my experience, having tried to work around it for hours, this has not been true, and community feedback seems to agree the 'exploit' was largely not an issue, the 'fix' is a downgrade, and there were other balancing choices that could've been implemented. It may be less of a problem for anything starting from scratch on a smaller map (like the early campaign missions), but trying to work with it in my current games has proved frustrating enough that I'm currently abandoning endless mode.
The current dev response on the issue seems unclear- they have acknowledged that it's not been well-received, so they're at least listening, but so far it seems like they're taking a 'this is still better and you haven't figured it out yet. we won't fix it, we're just going to explain it more' approach that is a little concerning. I'm hoping things change because I still have a lot of hope for this game.