izigame.me

This game is a weird mix between Banished and Factory Town without being satisfying.
I bought it for the graphics, but after just 30 hours in, I encounter bugs and got often irritated playing. It's difficult to optimise anything, not because of the thinking needed, but the lack of information from the devs.
I do not recommend for experience gamers. If you have more than 50 hours playing CIV, you'll be disappointed.
About the management experience
Like banished, you cannot control your work force and they need to take breaks. However, the IA cannot stick to a task long enough, so your workers just run around and take breaks. You can make it better with more haulers and some upgrades like Workplace training, but it stays unsatisfying.
Each time you start a new production, you'll have to create a new blueprint. At first, it seems interesting, but if you want to try various items, it can get annoying. Since you have multiple ways to build items to change their stats, you often have to redo your blueprints for the same item. The worst part is to update your blueprints each time you add something to your workshop to keep the new flow.
About the optimisation experience
You can optimise your blueprints, but since your profit is always way higher than the parts needed to build products, it doesn't make a great difference. After 30 hours, my materials cost around 2,000$ and sell 15,000. I did not care to optimise the materials at this point.
The Help Menu is completely useless, is only explains general mechanics without any numbers or brackets. For example, there is no info on the max limit of happiness (more than 100 is useless). You can always try to find info online. This is far from the CIV 5 Wiki I am used to.
The game will limit you often. You want 2 different zones assigned for one machine? You can't, you'll have either leave a lot of useless space or let your workers being slowed by stuff everywhere. You want to start with everything available? You can't, you have to start from scratch. You want to have a save to test assembly lines and your workshop? You can't, when you start a new game you erase all your previous saves. You want to save some materials or start a production ahead? You can't, everything needs to be rebuild each time you plan a product. Useless parts cannot be reused. you want to build a bit more in case something happens? You can, but know that you'll be stuck forever with useless parts.
About the ambiance
Sadly, it doesn't have the peacefull ambiance like Banished. You have to accept not being in control at all while having strict timelines and visual triggers to keep you alert, like broken equipment and phone calls. Note that you can disable random events as they don't matter at all (I wish I knew that firsthand).
At the same time, it's not like PlateUp where you have to perform. If you don't deliver, you just miss XP. So there is no threat to finish or not your productions.
About the bugs
When you need more than one copy of an item to build something, every copy needs to be stacked together for your assembly worker to grab it. Which means endless waiting for you haulers to do their job.
Sometimes parts become unreachable and cannot be used ever again. It happens to me while building a robot, which is a known and common bug. It has stopped my production (I was hoping someone would finish by getting the part) and I was stuck with the robot arm on the floor.
I recommend playing Banished, PlateUp, Factory Town, Frostpunk, CIV (any one), Rollercoaster Tycoon Classic, TD Bloons, even Plague before buying this. And when you do, you are sure to be disappointed.