izigame.me

I went into this game very optomistically. I thought this was going to be a fascinating game based on the very positive it had at the time (it still does, but in the event it changes...), but after these three hours of gameplay there are just too many things nagging at me.
The game is undoubtedly beautiful from a music and visual standpoint. Some of the cinematics are pretty good though a lot of the in game cutscenes could be improved a bit as it appears a bit choppy. The story is a little generic and they bring up a lot of things like the Fermi Paradox and Dark Forest Theory. It's a bit jarring and would be more interesting if they more or less implied it, but the dialogue is very on the nose and the conversations feel a little forced and out of nowhere sometimes. The story doesn't flow very well and it's pacing feels off. When I first noticed my level when I got the chance, I was already Level 34. Why there at the very beginning? Also, the game mentions several big bads in this story very early one, and considering you briefly fight the 'most powerful' one in the prologue and can't dent it, it makes it seem like they are all going to be difficult to beat. But then you fight one at Area 2 Level 3, within 2 hours of the game. Like what? I get you are apparently the Chosen One, but how on earth do you go from your faction being 'on the run for 5 years' to being able to hop, skip, and jump to facing on the big bags essentially within a day? I don't know how long the game is, but whatever its length, it feels like it should be much longer.
And that reminds me of another thing. I mentioned starting at level 34, right? Okay, so why are you at first restricted to a maximum of level 40? No, seriously, why? And then after dealing with that first 'big bad' boss as mentioned earlier does you're level max only goes up by 5? Why couldn't you have just started at level 0 or 1? Why limit level growth so much? Is it because the levels are short and there's only like 3 per 'area'. The decision making with this is so irritating. Yes, there's two other ways to increase your character's abilities, but one is equipment which is a roll of the dice at best, and the other is an alternate unit which you have to balance between your characters and a couple other things. So if it wanted you to prioritize between one or the other it's not doing a very good job at inferring that. And getting them is very feast or famine. Normally, you'll get a lot after every stage due to a conversation mechanic which seems a bit odd considering some of the conversations are like 5 sentences long or via leveling up, which again is very limiting since you can only level up at most 5 times per area but trying to grind for them outside of that is incredibly difficult.
The environments, in their own way, are pretty in a cyber sci-fi kinda way, but it's not exactly something new and it all feels the same. Whenever you go into a 'new area' stuff may change but it doesn't feel you went all that far. They try to explain it away with worldbuilding saying things like it's built by machines therefore doesn't have humanity's creativity, or the infrastructure was made for humanity but humanity gave up on physical flesh and blood bodies so everything's machine-like now, but it just feels lazy and unrealistic.
The combat is alright from a basic standpoint, but there felt like no real build up in the skill set. While the tutorial stuff was fine. It gave you all the options in the first couple levels and seemed to expect you to be able to use them all effectively. This is especially egregious when the game will not let you kill some beginning enemies because it wants you to use a specific attack or feature as its the tutorial. Which I get as a tutorial mechanism but when they are actual enemies doing full damage to you it is frustrating seeing them forever at the 'one sliver of health' but it won't let you kill them because you didn't use this one specific type of attack which I never used again.
This gets onto my next issue with the combat, it is so fast and unrelenting that you basically have no time to even react. This wouldn't be so bad if there was a slow build up and you had plenty of time and enemies to get used to all the different mechanics and use them effectively. This is not the case. The stages are very short, the most enemies I've seen by the third area, with each area thus far only having three different levels, is about 10. And the enemies attacks are flashy, can be very quick, and it often doesn't feel worth it enough to try these different mechanics.
What prompted me to give this review, however, is Lobos, the Whale Boss. Now, while I like this boss's concept and have no issue with it in that sense, this boss's fight is so damn frustrating that it finally made me sit back and review all the things that'd been nagging at me up until that point that I'd been ignoring. This boss has areas that light up when they are about to be attacked. Standard procedure. But often time it feels like how much time you have before the attack lands is significantly shorter than what you expected. Attacks hit behind you and since the soundbite feels the same regardless of where it hits, you can't judge how far away the attack is.
A thing that hasn't been an issue up until now is that you tend to flinch with hit. This boss throws several attacks one after another in very rapid succession that a minuscule to a quarter/half you hit points in damage. This game apparently has zero i-frames. All this couples to you going from near full hitpoints to a game over screen before you even can attempt to react. And when this boss's area of effect covers basically the entire area you're stand on with very minimal exceptions. Again, this would be so difficult if the game built you up to this in any way or allowed you to properly level up, but it doesn't. And it makes for such a frustrating experience when you are chain combo'd out of no where because attacks are happening behind you that you can't see and there's so many attacks happening at once that you have little time to react... within the first three hours of gameplay. It feels like this boss should be way later in the game.
And I'm not ashamed to admit I was playing on the Casual Mode for this game, not the normal mode. I don't even want to consider how brutal this boss would be outside of that. I don't know, maybe I'm just bad and need to 'git gud', but quite frankly I can deal with hard games. This just seems unfair.
Maybe I'll come back later and try again, potentially revising my thoughts on it then. But for right now, my overall opinion of this as a game is not very high. Outside of its game aspect, I enjoy it very much, however. But for a game, I recognize that's not exactly something positive for it.