izigame.me

Game is good and worth playing but leaving a negative review because this is quite a disappointing release. In my view there are number of significant regressions both in comparison to the first game and in comparison to the final early access build. Having Iron Man Mode be campaign only and then having a convoluted system where deaths in an Iron Man campaign affect all the other game modes just doesn't make any sense. What's worse, in the first game losing units was never a hindrance to gameplay because the gameplay was fair and being careful yielded successful results. In this game, when you start an Iron Man campaign, the mechanics and balance of the game are deliberately manipulated to the most absurd extremes to ensure that you will constantly lose units no matter how careful you are. Literally your units will get wounded in engagements where the enemy didn't even have a chance to fire, they just hitscan you with a bullet the very instant you engage them. It's bizarre that the devs have fallen into this trap of thinking that people who like rogue-like experiences enjoy unfair and illogical game mechanics, considering that the permadeath aspect of the first game worked so well.
The state of the CIA faction is pretty bad compared to early access. In early access the CIA was really a stroke of genius, simultaneously solved the problem of how to integrate stealth into the unique gameplay formula of Doorkickers, while also making coop a really interesting experience as the CIA abilities could be used synergistically with other factions. For whatever mysterious reason developers do this kind of stuff, it was decided that this was too balanced and enjoyable, so they made CIA's abilities absurdly overpowered and then "balanced" the game by covering 2/3 of the maps in a red "Suspicion zone" that disables all CIA gameplay. The idea of the suspicion zone could be used in a legitimate way to balance CIA gameplay, but in most cases they literally just cover the entire map in a suspicion zone. Considering it's a top-down game and all the devs need to do to create these zones is pop a rectangle down in the editor and drag it over the desired area, this is an obscenely lazy "solution" to a problem that didn't need to exist in the first place.
Beyond that, I just get the sense that nobody on the dev team actually plays the game. From really basic QOL stuff like having to manually select your squad members on every single mission start, the unchangeable RMB keybind for both drawing and interacting with units frequently interfering with unit control (and why are the main keybinds unchangeable in any case?), the fact that placing breach charges now creates a massive "detonate" button which totally envelopes the unit that placed it and makes it extremely annoying to withdraw them from the blast area without accidentally blowing the charge... There's just so many things that could be so easily improved and are so strongly apparent after a modest amount of playtime.
The good news is that basically everything that's wrong with the game could be fixed easily and quickly, and otherwise the basic foundation is good.