izigame.me

Pros:
- Combat feels amazing. Activating bullet-time highlights weak spots on enemies. Targeting said weak points makes enemies drop ammo, health and bullet-time refills. The game pushes you to always be on the offense and you can pull off some sick moves using wall-running, sliding and shotgun-jumping.
- Melee "glory kills" do not kill the pace of combat by locking you into an unskippable animation. A quick flick of the katana does the job. They are also not the only way of turning enemies into resource pinatas.
- The weapons feel distinct from each other and have their own strengths and weaknesses.
- No gameplay balance breaking secrets or progression systems you have to look up guides for or grind through. The game does it the old-school way by introducing new enemies, weapons, level hazards and ramping up the challenge. It's a short campaign at about 6 or 7 hours, but it feels like they went with all killer and no filler.
- A basic story to at least provide some context to what you are doing and why. It also surprisingly refuses to reuse the tired cliche you will be expecting the entire game.
- The AI can be surprisingly agile as you will often see humanoid enemies use their jetpacks to get to the platform you are standing on.
Cons:
- The AI can be really stupid at times. You will frequently see enemies standing in one place in the middle of combat, throwing themselves off buildings or failing to aknowledge that you are even there until you open fire.
- The level design is great, but the game never pushes you to use it. In something like Severed Steel, you are invulnerable when doing slides, wall-runs, etc. It feels like these levels would have been a better fit in that game. Here you can simply circle-strafe to avoid projectiles and hitting weak points is far easier if you do so. There is also no point in littering the levels with resources if killing enemies quickly maxes out the ones you carry. These things combined result in you frequently murdering everything within an arena 5 meters away from its entrance and then realising there were ammo, health, straight walls and a lot of verticality you could have utilized.
- The platforming is too easy. Falling simply has the game teleport you to the last platform you were on. I think it took 10 armor points every time that happened at one point, but even that penalty seemed gone later. If you look at the patch notes, they also added an extra jump you are able to do while wall-running. This seems to have removed a lot of the skill required in mastering some of these platforming challenges, as previously you most likely would have had to use the slide-jump boost and wall-switching in order to gain enough momentum. Now you can stick to one wall much longer by re-jumping on it twice. The tutorial at the start of the game isn't even updated to aknowledge the added jump.
- The game is really bad at explaining what it wants you to do in order to defeat bosses. For the first one, unlike every enemy you've faced so far, you need to shoot ALL of the weak points until their individual health goes down. After which, you can shoot the baddie inside past the point of his health dropping to 0 and yet the fight will keep going. With the second boss, you need to shoot specific sections that aren't highlighted, even though the game has been teaching you the exact opposite so far. Oh and you can swim now, even though that's never been a possibility before. For the last boss, the game starts spamming projectiles at you and deprives you of resources. I still have no idea if you are even expected to be able to heal or defeat some of the enemies here.
- The game also used to have 4 set difficulty options. I would prefer those instead of the god-mode toggle, pick-up disabler, enemy/player damage and bullet-time burn-rate sliders in the settings menu. At least that way I would know the game difficulty was somewhat ballanced and I wouldn't be able to optimize the fun out by using unlimited bullet-time or making some enemies invincible (the slider doesn't apply to weak point damage surprisingly enough).
- While it's good that there is a story, it feels a bit bare bones. A lot of things mentioned have no context behind them, leaving me confused. Maybe the context is to be found in the codex entries you can pick up by walking over them, but my idea of fun in this kind of game isn't stopping the action every 2 minutes to look up a guide to stop the action for 2 more minutes while I read a text screen. It also doesn't help that Father will often talk to you in the middle of combat or that if you quit the game after starting a new episode, his dialogue will not repeat even though you've just restarted from the same checkpoint.
- Some of the weapons kind of suck. The SMGs feel outclassed by the pistols and shotgun for 2/3 of the game. It's not until you start facing more robot enemies that take less weak point damage that they come into their own. The minigun feels like it was nerfed to do too little damage to be worth using most of the time. It's just "the SMGs but worse" in a lot of situations. And I don't know whose terrible idea it was to have the railgun need to charge up every shot. I need to somehow predict when exactly the damnable thing will fire while dodging enemy projectiles? And it does too little damage to the tougher enemies to be worth using anyway. Could have tightened the spread of the rocket launcher's rockets a bit more too so it wasn't only useful on the one mini-boss enemy.
- Dot crosshair feels a tad too large. Makes it hard to aim at distant targets.
- Signposting isn't always clear with where you need to go next. The levels are pretty linear aside from a few backtracking instances though, so you won't be needing a guide to look at.
- The soundtrack can get stale as there isn't much variety between song compositions. The choir that seems to be featured in every song became outright grating at points for me.