izigame.me

as much as id like to give this game a positive review i have to echo what other reviewers have said; this is a game that is quite literally designed to waste your time, sometimes in totally rng manner out of your control. where long walks back and forth are a basic part of gameplay but it only allows you to save when resting at inns/your caravan or by wasting extremely limited inventory space on consumable bedrolls(which can still get you killed). it feels extremely barebones for a game that is 5 years old since release and makes me think what another reviewer said must be true; this must be a side hustle while they work another full time job. i truly find it hard to believe a team of devs are working on this full time and this is all they have to show after 5+ whole years because from what i understand alot of the features are already multiple years old and updates are few and far between.

it seems like a pretty big world at first but then you realize each town only has like 3-4 one time quests at most, virtually all of which are just fetch quests for specific items that you'll find randomly in dungeons or from some specific mobs you will be too weak to fight for dozens of hours and even 50 hours later i havent completed some of the quests i got in my first few hours of playing. theres lots of random "points of interest" locations out in the world but they feel like a total waste of time from my experience as virtually every single one i went to will get you killed until much later in the game AND have virtually no reward for even exploring them. 2 of the 4 towns arent even really towns as one is just an inn of thieves and the other a destroyed ruin with a few guards/1 merchant and by the time you've left the first town and begun the main quest to open the caravan you've already seen most of what the game has to offer. there is a very barebones story but after 55 hours of play i could not tell you what the story is about, what a stoneshard is or anything thats going on at all beyond the fact that im after some guy that betrayed another guy im supposedly indebted to but the game wont say why im indebted to him or why im risking my life hundreds of times in often very dangerous circumstances for this dude who has hardly anything to say to me. in fact, id say the games hourish long tutorial has more story than the actual game so far and most of the game cycle just involves grinding the same 3 procedurally generated dungeons over and over until you're high enough lvl to go to the next tier where you repeat the cycle again with stronger humans/skeletons etc. it feels like most of the tedium is just there as a time sink so you don't complete the game in 20-30 hours or whatever as theres not really much content to be found in the game beyond grinding randomly made dungeons repeatedly. they made this entire huge "endgame city" thats bigger than all the other cities combined but feels utterly pointless as it has next to no quests or anything to really do in it and even using the proper vendors there requires quest unlocks and rep that you have to grind out at other cities; to say this city feels incomplete is an understatement considering how big it and the fact its got more npcs than all the other cities combined but how utterly empty of purpose of it. the worst part is that its already been in the game for 3+ years at least based on my google searches so they've done basically nothing with it for 60%+ of the games dev time.
i can tell you that my tolerance for the games systems are basically at an end and ive lost interest beyond playing a few hours a week at most maybe and the moment i die at the end of a dungeon and get an hour+ of progress reset i just close the game and im done for the session and unfortunately this is something thats going to happen to you multiple times most likely. for those who have played battle brothers, its very much like a solo run of that but designed in a way to waste hours and hours of your time on reloads and walks of shame; like imagine if you could only save at town but every location you had to go to was 5+ days of travel away, that would be my comparison. if you believe the devs, alot of the games tedious nuisance things were "solved" by the addition of the caravan but it makes me wonder why it took them nearly 5 years to reach that point and i can only imagine how absolutely cancerous the game must have been prior to the addition of it because its really just a bandaid fix for a larger problem and theres still ALOT of tedium involved in using it when you factor in your limited inventory space and the multiple walks back and forth moving loot from dungeons; it makes it even worse when you realize this is basically a brand new feature and didnt exist for 90% of the games lifetime as it feels like something that should have been in the game from launch and the basic intro story seems to be intertwined with it. eventually you'll realize that the best way to loot a dungeon is to drop all the stuff you're picking up in there outside at the entrance, which means repeatedly going back and forth in the dungeon transporting loot drops to the surface since the dungeon locks after you turn the quest in meaning you MUST get the loot out before you turn in the quest and it also means multiple trips back and forth between town/dungeon/caravan just turning in your drops from any dungeon delve or even worse, sometimes to an entirely different town as the one you're at cant even afford to pay you properly. simultaneously, the contracts are also on a timer so you cant really linger and must be efficient in all aspects so there's no resting repeatedly and taking your time to clear a dungeon or you could fail it and not get a reward and then you'll be lucky if the loot covers your repairs and consumable costs. its totally possible to die 3-4 times on the same quest and then breeze through it on the next try with no issues, such is the rng system they've designed with massively punishing bleeds, injuries and various status effects that require items to deal with and due to this nature about half your extremely limited inventory space will always be going toward consumables.
there are tons of other things that can be nitpicked that i didnt bother to get into that you can read in other reviews and i feel like ive said enough; it just feels like this is a really incomplete game after 5 years honestly. there are 1 man amateur free games that only subsist on patreon that get far more consistent updates with more dense content. its just a shame as it has the potential to be a good game as the core combat is decent but it feels really held back by some dumb/stubborn design choices and how hollow it feels. maybe in another 5 years you'll have a decent game here but with how few and far between updates are it might not be ready then either. i bought this at full price and regret not waiting for a sale, ive paid half the price for games ive put 10x the amount of time into that im still not done with.