izigame.me

I absolutely love this game and very much enjoyed pouring hundreds of hours of my life into it, and plan to do more in the near future. I finished my Normal mode playthrough and am just about to clean up and finish my Hard mode playthrough so I think I am just about qualified to put what I've gathered thus far:
The game's storytelling is incredible. At the very beginning, you are thrown into a room with roots, dirt walls, and an inactive core, and even though nothing is explained to you, the design of the game is so intuitive that I went a really far ways into the game without even needing to look anything up on the wiki, which is incredibly rare for this style of game.
I can clearly tell that the game was balanced incredibly well... for normal mode. I can feel myself getting stronger in a directly proportional relation to how much effort I put into growing my character, and the dopamine hit is insane as I walk into an area and get to participate in a mini bullet hell, only to come out on top. I think that that is a big part of the charm of the game.
I love the way that food was implemented. There is an incredible amount of variety that comes with the choices you are allowed to make as a player when it comes to what you eat. I'd say that after 30 minutes of playtime, food becomes less of a hindrance and more a huge part of what gives this game its character. When I say that I can feel my strength increasing directly based on how much effort I put in, the food system plays probably the biggest role in that. There is no limit to the amount of buffs that you can have on your player, besides the amount of effort you are willing to put in to coordinating them. One caveat that I will note here- I play with the Keep Farming mod, which allows me to reliably fill up my tummy with a variety of Golden Crops really reliably once hitting farming 80, so my relationship with the food system isn't *entirely* vanilla.
This does bring me onto my next point. The Mod Integration is also a really cool thing to have as a default setting in the game. There is no alternate version of the game to download or anything, or a third party to manage all the files through. Everything is hosted natively, and many of the mods exist solely to improve the game in ways that I think the base game could benefit greatly from. For some examples of mods that I really appreciate and why:
-Keep Farming: Pretty self explanatory, allows me to take Core Keeper from a game where you can garden into a game where you can Farm, which is a huge difference. I do think that the game could benefit from a way to create more seeds from the ones you have planted (Maybe increase base seed reclamation % by 5%, so at Gardening 25 you get 105% seeds from crops?), especially since getting more seeds in huge quantities is pretty tough at all stages of progression.
-Placement +, I think its called. I have a giant base in my hard mode run, and without this mod it still wouldn't be finished. Increase the scale of placement and shovel actions with keybinds and then alter greater parts of the world with it. This small QOL mod played likely the biggest part in shaping my experience in my latest playthrough.
-Faster Minecarts: The world is infinitely large. Minecarts don't get any faster than the one obtained in the Forgotten Ruins. I think this is pretty self explanatory, as it keeps Minecart tracks both relevant and useful to the player, especially as the slower minecarts typically aren't fast enough to avoid getting killed by the Tentacles in the Sea or the Assassins in the Desert.
Anyways, there's far more to this game than the modding, and I love every single thing about it, besides one important, glaring one.
One of the complaints that I saw in the Core Keeper subreddit a couple of days ago was that the Bosses in hard mode were so incredibly easy and the mobs were too hard, and that one of the devs was confused by this since they hear a lot that the bosses are too hard, and the mobs are easy. I agree with both of these, and it stems from the fact that Hard mode is definitely in dire need of some balancing assistance. I get that its hard difficulty, but that is no excuse to be getting consistently 2-shot at EVERY stage of the game. The slimes in the dirt biome deal a good chunk of health, but its nothing to really worry about. I stepped foot into the clay caves and got dropped immediately into dangerously low health by a single spear, dealing 130 damage in a place where there are not many options to increase the health pool or armor stat of the player. I immediately hid back in my base and fished for a while to gather some resources and try again. Despite preparing, 2 shots still would've killed me, just for stepping into the second area of the game.
This is a constant story throughout the whole game. From what I can see, Normal difficulty is balanced so that by the time you make it into a new biome, a roughly equivalent amount of hits will kill you based on the relationship between your Max Health, Armor, and enemy damage. The thing that really changes the game is the enemy mechanics, which makes for a game that doesn't get more damaging, just more technical at a rate at which the player can pick it up.
This balance falls apart immediately on Hard Difficulty. If you had 80 points of armor on Normal, and an enemy deals 150, you'd take 70 points of damage. That's fair, as it gives you as the player room to make mistakes and still feel like you are growing in strength. In Hard Difficulty, the damage doubles. This seems like it should be fine as a difficulty increase, but in practice the amount of damage taken is far more than double due to the fact that none of your defensive stats become more effective. With 70 points of armor, you don't take double damage from an enemy that deals 150 in normal, you take something closer to triple due to the fact that your defensive stats consistently lag behind in all stages of the game.
At no point in the game can I feel myself as a player getting stronger, just that I am barely holding on. Just as enemies in the Clay Caves 2 shot me, as so enemies in the Forgotten ruins, the Azeos Wilderness, the Sunken Sea, The Desert (to an extreme degree) and the Shimmering Frontier (at a point where it just feels insane.) Whenever engaging with the combat system gets you sent home every 10 minutes, players are incentivized to play defensively at all times, and are punished for spreading their wings. This led me to a gameplay loop where I would play a little bit in the zone to find a boulder, hide in my base and upgrade, and then run to the next zone and do the next. By the time that I had gotten to the point where I was running out of upgrades to do to my gear, I was still getting killed almost immediately by random events outside of my control. I think that if the damage stats were identical on paper as it got processed through your defensive stats, and THEN got doubled, instead of being doubled already when it ran through, the difficulty would be a lot more consistent and manageable for players such as myself (i.e. 300 damage - 70 defense = 230 damage vs. (150 damage - 70 defense = 80 damage) x2 = 160 damage. I think this would be far better as, in late game areas, I'm consistenly taking what feels like 5-6x the damage from enemy attacks, instead of the double I was told to expect.
Besides the (imo) poor balancing on the hard mode side of things, the devs have put together an incredible game that is filled with some of the best gameplay and most enthralling visual storytelling I've ever encountered in a game, and for incredibly cheap at that. Definitely recommend.
Oh and, dodge chance maxes out at 90%, but defense only blocks up to 75%. Was this intentional?
tl,dr: Incredible game, immediately became one of my favorites of all time. Could use some more QOL, Hard Mode balancing is wack (or personal skill issue tbh), but still a 9.9/10 normal mode.