izigame.me

This game seriously needs to be patched. It absolutely KILLS ME to give this game a bad review, but unfortunately in it's current state, I have to. I was (and still am) rooting for these 3 developers, and pains me to see their work of art and passion released in its current state. I REALLY wanted this game to succeed, and I hope there's still time for them to turn things around.
BUGS I'VE ENCOUNTERED:
- If you get killed while trying to fast travel at a checkpoint, your camera gets all messed up, and you teleport in a completely random location.
- After returning to the first area to fight the giant monkey, my healing items don't display properly. I'm not sure if it's because of the monkey, or a lingering irreversible effect from the fast-travel death bug. Basically it keeps saying my healing flasks are at 2, but it doesn't let me heal. Then when I die, it makes them disappear from the slot. No matter how many times I respawn, return to the menu, or close and reopen the game, this bug will NOT go away. And I REALLY don't want to have to delete my save file... assuming even that'll fix it.
- If the monkey kills you, the sky stays dark, and you can't open your inventory because the game thinks you're still fighting it. For the non game developers reading this, please excuse my game dev jargon, but it seems to me like the scene doesn't even reload upon death. The game just changes the enemy states from dead to alive, and teleports you back to the checkpoint. Sure, doing it this way means faster respawn times, but it also opens up a lot of possibilities for things to go wrong. And that's exactly what happened after the monkey killed me. The current way death is handled, not everything resets properly after death. If they simply made the scene reload while saving your data from the previous scene instance, this problem wouldn't exist.
- I clipped straight through one of the walls in the monkey area. And frankly, it's mind blowing just how many bugs are related to the monkey.
- (Take this one with a grain of salt) When I climb onto the giants, and stab them over and over again, there seems to be a 50% chance that I'll just die randomly. I'm not sure if there's some mechanic I'm forgetting about, or if it's just a flat out bug. So if that's actually intentional, and I'm just being a dumbass, please ignore this.
- When I try to unequip an item from the quick slots, it'll reappear almost instantly.

DESIGN FLAWS:
- You can't use items while swimming, the oxygen meter goes down super fast, and the underwater area is so spacious, but there's no indication of anything that will restore your oxygen, no air bubbles, no air in the buildings (at least the ones I've gone to). The game needs to do a better job of communicating to the player what the hell they're supposed to do underwater. Because currently, I have no idea.
- The tutorials are good, but there's no way to re-access them once you make them disappear. There should be an option in the pause menu to re-read the tutorials.
- You can only run in 8 directions. I'm no expert in the Unreal Engine (yet), but I do have a fair amount of experience with Unity. Depending on how similar these engines are, I really don't think implementing more turning angles would've been that difficult at all. If I were a fourth dev in that dev team, I would've done a Vector2 input system (I'm not sure if Unreal Engine has a different name for it than Unity), so it makes your turning angle the exact angle of your joystick. Because currently, when you walk on narrow bridges, if you make even the slightest adjustment, you'll go straight off the edge.
- A lot of the ladders are extremely long, and you can't even slide down them. This game is already a souls-like, so it baffles me that they didn't implement a basic thing such as that. It's so painful to have to slowly climb down, every single time.
CONCLUSION:
If it weren't for these game-breaking bugs and design oversights, this would've been a great game, and it still can be if it gets patched SOON! I'm fully aware that this game was made by only 3 people, and I feel really bad for them, because a lot of passion must've gone into this. If I made a game that I poured my heart and soul into, and it got a bunch of bad reviews, I'd probably get crippling depression. It pains me a ton, that I might be doing that to them. But the cold hard truth is that they jumped the gun way too early. They should've given it a few more months to polish it up as much as possible. I really hope they patch this soon. It's not too late yet, but the clock is ticking, and they REALLY need to haul ass to fix these bugs before people forget about this game.
I really hope I will have an opportunity to write a good review, once everything has been fixed. So please fix it!!! I hope the devs won't be disheartened by this, and I hope these reviews will serve as a valuable lesson for any and all games they make in the future.