izigame.me

I like this game, I see the soul and passion behind it but you have to be kidding me with the pricetag. the game has 30ish guns and they all feel the same except they deal different kinds of damage (they feel reskinned essentially.) The game has a very limited amount of enemies and bosses too. The thing is the game LOOKS nice, it has personality, but it is heavily hindered because it took absolutely no risks in terms of gameplay. There are EIGHT CHARACTERS IN TOTAL that you can play with. There are lots of stages that you can fight in, but they (for now, in my 9hrs) all seem to be cosmetic, they have no real differences. They also feel too similar, of course they can come with different enemy types but the enemies are an entirely different issue (ill talk about it).
So enemies come with elemental weaknesses, that means the usage of certain elemental weapons is incentivized over others (depending on which enemy you are fighting). this forces you to basically always use the SAME WEAPONS against enemy types. There are only 30 or so weapons in the game, why would the developers choose to give players even less freedom in the way they play by basically making them use certain weapons? this seems like just bad game design, and this game has a lot of that and ill comment on that too.
The game lacks major QoL features. If you play solo, your npc friends cannot use ults on their own so you have to switch to them. Certain characters, even when you activate their ultimate and switch back to your preferred character, will simply stay in their ultimate mode and not do anything (bunker is the prime example). Why would they make everything so..shallow? why not make each character really unique? each time i pick a character, i play the exact same way and it is of no consequence. Why not have weapons only unique to the character you are using? why not have a melee only character or something? why is there NO MELEE WEAPON in the game? Why is there not a semblance of uniqueness or quirk to any of the characters???? This is a roguelike?
Another issue is the upgrade mechanics in the game. Each time you upgrade a gun it stays like that. it is now just stronger FOREVER. This is just stale. Not only that but the upgrades are not cosmetic, and they are only really tame upgrades (some of them are just copy and pasted to another gun.) like faster fire rate, more damage, less weapon spread etc. etc. It is SO BORING. For the love of god, please. rework all of the systems but this especially. Make guns actually unique. make heroes actually unique. give me consequences for my actions and add a bit of RNG to my game.
There is scrap in the game, a currency basically, which you cannot use for anything but really pointless loot boxes which give you bonuses on your next run. once you upgrade everything, its done. Your currency is now just an ever growing number. And speaking of abilities, each character comes with one minor skill, one ultimate, and one passive. Does this seem like its not enough? because it isnt enough. the game gets stale really early on. you unlock all the characters within 15hrs of gameplay and you unlock them in determined, specific ways. Why would you introduce such familiarity into a roguelike, devs? genuinely curious. Roguelikes are supposed to make you take risks, make you play with guns that you came across just because thats all you have, each run is supposed to feel new and fresh - i have never once felt like i have taken a risk in this game, i have never had to improvise, and i have never felt like im trying something new. This game falls behind incredibly when compared to other roguelikes.
Now on to the bugs. There are bugs that delete your progress, lock stories behind bugs. there is a very common bug where the enemies will just instantly die when they spawn. There are people who completed the game without any issue because they encountered no enemies lol. It is just unfair to make this game thirty dollars. that is not pocket change. i have never looked into my pocket and found thirty dollars. The last wish edition comes with 8 pdf files, and an mp3 soundtrack of the game and like 3 unique skins and thats ten dollars more. seriously? I think this is a game that will be monetized heavily. They will lock features behind paywalls, features that should already be in the game (i hope that this is just my speculation. prove me wrong please). The game needs more weapons, more characters and more everything - if you lock these behind a paywall, your game is going to die. the player numbers have halved already, and playing this game solo is..not perfect to say the least.
8 characters, 30 or so weapons and the limited pool of enemies (each monster category comes with only SIX different enemies) and the really, really repetitive and similar levels make this game into something that is not a roguelike. this game is only a roguelike in name only.
here is my conspiracy theory. I think the direction of the game was changed midway through development, because the amount of features missing from the game and the amount of game breaking bugs make me think that this isnt a game design oversight, it is just the developers being forced to redesign this game in a short amount of time. There is literally no texting in this game lol. I think the direction of the game was changed and the devs had to improvise a lot and did what they could. Look up how coop upgrades work. That is not just game design oversight - that seems like the devs didnt have enough time to implement simple features.
so here is what i think. I think the game has a lot of potential. It has good visual design but really really bad and confusing game design choices. The dev team seems to be receptive to issues, and they are already at work fixing the bugs. But at this moment, this game just isnt worth buying, especially for the price. I hope the devs really listen to my complaints because i have voiced them publicly multiple times. I want this game to be good. My suggestion is, wait. Just wait until they make this game worth picking up. And if they start monetizing it, then just pass on it. This is a disastrous launch with people literally not being able to play and their dlc codes being invalid. it is too vanilla, too predictable, too repetitive and is easily outclassed by other games in its genre. I was, and still am excited for your game despite all the complaints. I hope it gets better, i am cautiously optimistic.
EDIT: Submitted a refund request. I dont wanna have a game that is dead on arrival (the player count currently sits at 2.4k as opposed to its launch day number of 9k)
also, the game is not a roguelike. Its labeled as one, but thats false. Apparently, its a rogueLITE. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/XEgQFV31GUM
if you dont believe me, go on that video and see for yourself. listen to what he says. rogueLITE. not like. Guys, theres just a major transparency issue between the consumer base and the people in charge of the game. I just dont want that. I wish the best for your uh, roguelite i guess. The roguelike tag no longer shows up, it does not hold the roguelite tag even. This is the state of this game. The game can't even keep it's genre straight, it is brutally humiliating.
So this is what you will be getting for your (totally well priced) purchase: You will be getting Denuvo, which will scrape all the data from you. It is basically spyware. You get a game that crashes all the time, ruining your good runs. You get a game that erases your progress. You get a game that has so many gamebreaking bugs that I can't even count anymore. You get a game with confused "game design".
The most accurate analogy I have of this game (because the currently coping playerbase loves to make analogies to make scams like this seem good) is a headless chicken. Yeah. A headless chicken. You are paying for a bad game with spyware. Radio silence from the devs is very telling.