izigame.me

After almost getting 100% on it, my opinions changed on it a bit but im still somewhat mixed.
You can tell they tried to make something good, the visuals and music are great, the ideas are fun, but if you arent the type of person to replay the campaign over and over again 10 times, you probably wont get too much out of it since 1 campaign finish takes less than 2 hours.
After you finish a campaign you can restart it again from level 1 while you keep all the guns, cash and everything else and unlock new things as you go. The difficulty raise doesnt even scale with your loadouts that get so op you insta kill every last enemy, its literally just these things: Lets see how many shields we can glue to enemy ships, put some flying obstacles here and there, give the medium and above sized enemies a blue laser of obliteration. Some designs are really cool, all bosses are creative but you never see anything new apart from the level 1 boss getting a fighter plane to accompany the bomber plane, the level 3 tank getting like 2 new weapons and some flags and the final boss getting a grand total of 1 noticeable weapon change that you most likely destroy within 2 seconds anyway.
The main problem i have with it is that yes, it tries to expand upon and modernize the first game by adding realistic physics and making a bunch of platforms destroyable even tho you literally have no way to distinguish them from indestrucitbles since neither of them give any indication of taking damage and it also adds new gadgets and a few new weapons to play with, but thats about where the expanding stops because this just feels like they tried to steal...from their own damn game. This stuff takes so much from JnG Gold that you might confuse it for some random dude stealing but its the same people who worked on both games. Half the loadout if not more is guns from the first game, the game has not even 20 levels while JnG Gold has 43, A LOT of levels are just stolen ideas from the first game. Beer level? Stolen. Insect hive? Stolen. Lava planet? Stolen. Secret gumball race level? Stolen. Third level? Literally has the exact same start as the first games second level. Yeah you can say its a nice throwback but with how many throwbacks there are its hard to excuse it, like i might as well play the first game if everything is from the first game. Even an unlockable in the cargos is just the same teddy bear from the first game. Thats like whatever cause who cares about it, you just sell it anyway but theres a total of 3 other things you can find which are beer from the first game, a fish you can buy at anytime and a hotdog while the first game had tons of things to see and jokes to read.
This isnt some cashgrab or half baked game. It can be really fun but it just misses the mark too many times to make me proud of saying that this is the sequel to a game i really enjoyed when i was a kid. If you got the cash, especially when its on sale, you can go for it, there is fun to be had here, especially if you wanna do couch co-op with someone. But as a JnG Gold fan, this is sadly not it. I doubt there will ever be a JnG 3, but if the devs want to make it, i actually have high hopes. As long as they just make more new stuff, more levels that at least match the count of the first game, more wacky enemy, gun and gadget ideas and dont limit the player as much, only giving 1 ship and the task to finish a level to restock the shop, they can still make a good shoot em up.