izigame.me

TL;DR
The game is fun for a while, but then becomes a chore and really repetitive. Not worth 50 bucks, wait for a sale.
What a disappointment. The game starts off well, the combat is fun, the levels, especially the city, looks and feels great, the story is interesting, but...
During the second half of the game it becomes very repetitive. You visit the same levels over and over again, and while there is a reason for it story wise, it becomes just tiresome and even frustrating. Chasing the same enemy through the same map so-many times, just isn't fun.
The combat encounters in the second half, especially towards the end, are a real chore. There are many repeating boss encounters with only minor differences (and I should mention that all the bosses in the game are basically the same enemy type). Who in their right mind thought that repeating the same thing over and over is a good idea? The game has 5 or 6 different enemy types, including bosses (they are usually just reskins), which is already really poor, but then you fight the same Enemy over and over again... It's just no fun and turns into a chore/pure frustration.
I even ended up turning the difficulty down, just to finish the battles faster, which is something I've never done before.
Some of the story bits and conversations feel very "game-y"/make no sense and you can easily tell they're just there to artifically up the tension. For example characters stopping at every corner to comment on how the opponent is getting away, while in reality, you could easily get them if your characters wouldn't stop so often, or a boss commenting on how bad we're fighting and to come back when we're stronger, while in reality we just wiped his ass with no effort, etc... The same is true for the levels as well btw, but more on that later.
Inter-mission conversations could've been better, the characters are just floating around, most of the dialogues are not voiced and mostly use grunts and other noises instead.
Overall I'd say the story is really interesting, but the writing is just okay.
Some of the characters you can play have 0 backstory, they just exist because why not, while others have an extensive even deep backstory.
One characters starts off strong, with introduction video, etc., but then there's just zero follow up, and later in the game, he's just added to the roster, without any real explanation (a map marker appears out of nowhere, you click on it, a short dialogue, boom, you got the character. Why? How? Who cares.)
To me it feels like the game was planned to be much bigger, but then they had to cut a lot of stuff, and just finished with what they had somehow. This is also visible in some levels. In the first few levels the level designer took care to make the level bounds not too obvious by obstructing paths, etc., but in the later levels there are often just invisible walls.
Regarding the level design itself: It's one of the strong points of the game, the levels ooze with detail and are generally really well realized, but as with the dialogue, there's some artifical/game-y stuff. Paths obstructed for no reason, doors randomly open/lock, paths you can't take because the game won't let you, etc.
Thinking of it now, the game has a lot of hand-holding, there are some really big levels, but you're often restricted to a specific path, even if it doesn't make sense, characters often tell you things that are pretty obvious, and I actually sometimes got frustrated that the game wouldn't just let me do. I honestly get the feeling that the devs were scared to let the player do their own thing (or thought of us as dumb).
It's such a shame, the game could've been great, it had a really good start, the combat is fun, and they tried something new that actually works well, but then the whole thing ends as poor as it does...
I really wanted to like the game, I'd really have prefered to give this game a positive review, and for a long time it actually looked like I would do that, but no, not with a poor second half like that.
I suspect that a lot of the good reviews here were written before they finished playing the game.