izigame.me

I really wish steam allowed for more neutral ratings. So, my boyfriend and I played this game together and after we finished, we decided this game was pretty good, but somewhat of a mixed bag. I'm grateful I decided to play this game with him for a lot of reasons, but regardless, there were flaws that became more apparent to both of us as we went on. I understand the initial mixed rating now because this game would've been nearly impossible to finish alone.
To communicate my thoughts more clearly, I’ll be listing my thoughts in a list of pros and cons.
Pros:
-The art and animations are lovely. The world is really well crafted, and you can tell there was a lot of passion poured into the look and feel of this game. The way your character moves feels really satisfying, with the pace being particularly noteworthy. While the lore of the world is a little inconsistent and requires a lot of reading, I found everything we discovered to be fascinating and enjoyed crafting theories on everything.
-The general mechanics are pretty fun, albeit a little repetitive (more on that in the cons section). This game, outside of a few parts, also felt like a fair challenge and it did feel like upgrades stuck.
- The enemy diversity really helps elevate this game. While a lot of the characters were reskins and had similar attacks, it didn’t feel that way because of the unique designs and animations. The sound design of character reactions and attacks were really satisfying too. You could feel the anticipation and the attack of many characters movements, and it made dodging and focusing feel very rewarding.
-The time loop function was honestly pretty fun. I’ve played a few time loop games at this point and I liked how that feature wasn't very frustrating outside of making explorations have a time limit of like 7 minutes in game. While it did make some of the dialogue pretty repetitive and made the characters a bit underdeveloped (which is disappointing when you’re trying to make your audience feel connected to certain characters) it’s not like the game forces you to interact with the characters and sit through the same dialogue over and over again, which is often an issue I have with time loop games (even the ones I like). I also enjoy how the actions you do over the course of the game feel like they matter, especially at the end when you fight the final boss. It was a game that successfully used time looping without making you loose progress or developments, which is something that I really like and appreciate.
-I liked how, if you so desire, you can change the look of your character to different outfits. While the only options are the skins that you were presented at the beginning of the game, I was very appreciative of the fact that you were given the option to diversify your clothing after building a clothing station.
-I liked the ground laying gun! While you need a lot of resources for it and it can be a little slow moving, setting down more places to move felt satisfying to me.
-I enjoyed the music of this game.
Cons:
-The gameplay gets really repetitive over time. The fact that there are no spell casting options, nor any minigames to spice up the gameplay makes the lack of getting new abilities all the more apparent. While the actual gameplay loop is pretty fun, it gets old pretty fast when there’s nothing else to do outside of shooting and scanning stuff. The scanning was kinda a chore, given how interruptible it is. There isn’t really even a leveling up system outside of clothe charming and bullet crafting and even then, those have their own flaws. There wasn’t any sort of signal to show that you were really progressing outside of character dialogue. While I understand that adding certain mechanics is much harder to implement than people make it out to be, it still would have been nice to have.
-There were multiple sessions my boyfriend and I would have to stop what we were doing to resource hunt. Resource hunting was such a grind because there was a 50/50 chance that the resources we needed would even drop. The crafting process also was not very fun. You often would have to just wait around with no other options for an item to finish being refined at a table so you could craft some bullets you needed.
-A lot of the bullets were not useful. While there were a few that were effective in certain areas (i.e. the frost bullets in the desert) the majority of bullets were not useful. The only truly effective bullets were the fire bullets, making our only incentive to research the fire bullets as much as possible so we could realistically fight the enemies. The only reason any other bullets were researched was because I decided to try them.
- I wanted to charm my clothes with different abilities, but you can only charm an item with one charm and the majority of the charms were not useful, leaving me to stick to health charms because they were the only useful charms for me.
-There were several areas that were straight up unfun/unfair. The desert immediately comes to mind for me. The enemies are insanely unbalanced and there are a million of them. A single hit from a lot of enemies in the desert area would half your health, making the sheer number of them impossible to fight. There were several times that there were so many enemies the game would lag, causing your characters to barely move and get hit. We started taking long routes to avoid enemies so we could survive/finish on time. The desert almost felt tacked on, like the devs felt like the game was too short/not hard enough so they made this unbalanced area that is unavoidable because it requires resources you need.
-If it wasn’t for multiplayer, I would have easily been soft locked in multiple areas causing me to have to restart the game. Chaos enemies completely destroy and erase the ground around you when you fight them. You need a lot of resources for your ground layer gun to build your way to places, and I wasn’t aware of this at the beginning of the game. There were several points my boyfriend or I were stuck on a single block and either had to hope the enemy would come back to hopefully destroy the block and respawn us back onto the map, or wait until your partner could come and save you.
-The final boss and ending were both anticlimactic in many ways. The fight that directly proceeded it was incredibly difficult. Considering we finished the final boss in less than 10 minutes, whereas the previous one required a lot of stopping to resource grind and try again, it made it easy to notice. Which sucks because the actual design and phases of the level were the most satisfying at that level, and yet it was so easy to defeat in comparison to basic enemies.
-There are 2 endings, and the first one was disappointing. It’s not clear what you’re supposed to do to get the good ending when not doing a wiki search (you have to golden bounty hunt then charm former bosses). I wish that the history between your character and the other characters was explored. It was a little disappointing to not see, but ultimately not a deal breaker.
I know I’ve listed a lot of lengthy cons here, but I really do have a lot of respect for this game. The reason I listed the flaws was because I really enjoyed the game overall and would love to see it improve. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s an option now that the company that made it went under. I was lucky I got to spend my time playing it with my boyfriend and it was a really good bonding experience. I think it really helped us spend quality time to get to know each other. I’m really grateful Galvanic Games was able to add the better together feature before their untimely disbandment. While this game absolutely could have been fixed with a few more patches and I would have loved to see a local co-op option, I think everyone can agree that for what this game is, it’s pretty solid and the studio did not deserve to go out in the way that it did. Best of luck out there team!