izigame.me

As Version 1.0, I would not recommend this to anyone until patches are made.

TL;DR, this game isn't bad. You can see that a lot of love was put into it, but love alone isn't enough to cover up the issues. And there are a TON of issues to the point where it feels like an Early Access title. Some examples include: the controls are janky, in-game sound often overlaps which then glitches, then dies out and you end up playing a completely silent game, the sound effects of what you're walking on doesn't match (walk on grass but hear metal instead), treasure chests either do not give you loot, don't show up, and continues to show as unopened when you scan.
For folks who want a rating system:
Story: 6/10
Art: 9/10
Music: 7/10
Combat: 9/10
General gameplay/exploration: 6/10
I will be coming back to this review after playing more of the game. The only reason I stopped is because the UI glitched out, overlapping everyone's equipment menus and the game just got so ugly on top of being absolutely silent that I needed to close it which led me to this review.
Edit 1: Sound died again, I still can't complete the first meat side quest because there aren't enough drops, and the loot is meaningless because it unequips itself.


The Positives

1. Portrait Art - They're all well drawn and gives the characters personality. The art style is like a mix of Ghibli and modern throwback's to old 1900's cartoons at least to me.
2. Music - sounds pretty good sometimes (when it plays properly) which I'll just count as a win.
3. Combat, but specifically how combat plays - the combat feels amazing in terms of your actions. You have the standard attacks, skills, but instead of defending you have evade which serves a purpose more than just defending. There's so much potential to customize too with the stats of every jet, but it feels very very bad when you don't get to even adjust equipment or decide who you want in your party until Chapter 4, with a crap ton of cutscenes and battles. It just stinks because by the time you can finally customize your team, you have the forced story progression characters vastly outleveling the characters that were excluded from your party Lv 22 story progression vs Lv 8 characters that were left behind . If somehow you can early on, then it means my game was bugged which doesn't help my enjoyment of the game.


The Issues

1. Controls - I get that when there's aerial movement involved, the controls may be weird to code, but the movement of your jets feel sluggish. Not sure if it's meant to be realistic, but I found myself purposely moving slow so that i don't scratch a wall or some other random collision and ricochet myself and throw my camera around. Then there's the weird sensitivity even in UI's. Moving from one command to another snaps so fast that sometimes it skips to another one completely. Like, in battle, I'll go from Command 1 to Command 3, skipping over Command 2 because it snaps weirdly fast. I'm going to chalk all this up to sensitivity issues which probably need patching.
2. Map - This game just needs a minimap. Also the control to open the map is broken and only works half the time with input, both on keyboard and on controller.
3. Combat but specifically the design of the skills - A lot of the elemental damage inflict DoT's at base levels. You can upgrade these skills to inflict other statuses, but by the time you can, seems like you're forced to play in a way where you punish enemies for targeting you and aim to dish out burst damage instead. I'm not super far yet, but from the HP pools that I can see, the DoT's feel way too bland. Also, why is a story boss given an attack that can oneshot you every two turns? There's zero counterplay as he can hit through evade.
4. Character models - What's going on? There's one character who has a portrait very clearly showing that they have a longer skinny face and is relatively toned in their full body portrait, but when you see their model, it's the complete opposite. Outside of that, everyone moves incredibly weirdly. Then they have the models in a series of dialogue where they're not even needed because randomly by Chapter 4, the portraits go from being small square ones to big full body size ones showing their body type and outfits in much more detail.
5. Sound - it dies and it dies very often. I got to a point where even the UI stopped making any sound. Then randomly in combat, there will be a jump scare where the wrong character's voice plays when it's their turn (ex: Fio's voice plays on Glenn's turn).
6. Treasure - half of the loot in exploration areas are glitched as in they don't show up, or they continue to show as unopened when scanning. Additionally, any equipment you may find might unequip itself while you exit the menu. This game seriously needs confirmation prompts that save your loadout.
7. Skill trees - Lack of skill points and option for skill point reset. I have characters that jumped from lv 7 to lv 27, and the game is telling me I only had two skill points, which implies that you get 1 SP per 10 levels. This isn't enough to customize your characters' skill trees which then contribute to your combat becoming bland by repeating the same loop over and over. Additionally, there's no prompt to check what the skill does. For example, if you are interested in a buff skill, you don't know what it does even if you can get it unless you saw an enemy use it. Sure you can save-scum it, but that's a massive waste of time.


Conclusion

I love this game, and I hope the devs work on a 1.1 patch to smooth the rough edges and just make this game better. They've already put a lot of love into it, why not sprinkle some more. The way it is right now feels very hard to enjoy. I'm not going to include the story as a positive or a negative, it's just very inconsistent where I am at roughly 10+ hours into the game.