izigame.me

Let's get the obvious out of the way first. Simply put, I became low-key OBSESSED with this game when it first came out. I was on a gaming bender triggered by my discovery of the rogue-like genre and was playing a ton of them from Hades to Slay The Spire as well as this one. I got my hands on this and, at least initially, grew hyper-fixated on the deck building system the Superhot-esque visual style, and the slick music and spy theming. Every few months I would return to this game and have another obsessive binge with it and, while the lack of content updates or patches was odd, I was too intent on maxing out my level and winning a run to get it done. Had it have been for these facts alone I would have strongly recommended this game, but the more it went on the more my feelings began to sour towards this game compared to others of its kind. Then, a few weeks ago I came back to this game again and saw the Weapon of Choice DLC pack. Thrilled for some new content I bought it and unfortunately, the experience I had playing it ultimately turned me against this game. Before I explain why though, let me briefly explain the gameplay.
As I alluded to previous the game is a rogue-like deckbuilder. You play as Agent 11 a super spy travelling to the locations of and engaging in brawls with various criminal organizations around the world. Each fight visualized as a generally monochromatic grid based chessboard like battlefield in one of the titular "Tight Spaces" wherein you have to use the cards you start with from fixed decks or a deck draft system to slug your way through increasingly tough types of enemies. The cards follow an energy based system similar to Slay the Spire in which each card has a cost and you cannot play any more cards than which exceeds your max energy (though some cards play with this number). Everything from how and where you can move to what your attack and defense options are come from this system. Enemies on the other hand do not use cards but rather move and attack once each (though late-game abilities and modifiers change this) per turn. It's up to you to smartly use your growing deck of cards to make it to the end-game and defeat the final boss.
On a surface level this system works fine particularly in the early game. Enemies have reasonable movements and damage output, the spaces they can attack in are clearly marked so you know where not to leave yourself to avoid getting slugged or shot, and you have a decent array of cards to counter them in whatever style you see fit. Enemies with higher health, damage, and extra abilities show up pretty quickly but it's gradual and hovering over an enemy during your turn shows you everything that they can do as well as the nature of their currently selected action. There are also options to potentially gain for energy for using cards, a higher combo meter to enhance certain cards, and options to heal/increase your max health and more to keep apace with the challenge,
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the OBNOXIOUS difficulty spike that begins to rear its head starting with the 3rd level of every run during the ninja fights. Very quickly a much wider number of enemy types start showing up (as well as occasional returns of earlier enemy types but way more powerful). Enemies suddenly start having annoyingly long attack ranges even without guns, auto counters, auto movement, are invincible if attacked from the front, immunity to being moved, and much more. This wouldn't be a deal breaker if the enemies still did lower or more reasonable damage to balance having these extra options but many are given ABSURD damage output and/or have abilities to massively boost their damage and armor quickly to the point of you eventually being able to lose a run in a single turn if you get surrounded. This issue only gets compounded upon with the DLC adding two new kinds of enemy that follow you throughout the run and get extra abilities in every section making them borderline untouchable (especially the gas mask enemy holy s**t!) as they skate around the arena avoiding you, dodge your precious few actions, or have brutal counter attacks if you somehow manage to corner them all the while dealing with the other borderline ridiculous enemy types. While the DLC does give you the new gun based cards to attack from the same kind of range as some enemies, it is inherently less effective due to the specific nature of a lot of the cards, constantly neutering your combo meter, and requiring some late game cards to make it truly effective.
Even if you play on the easiest difficulties that allow you to restart a fight if you fail, move before enemies, and ensures at least one movement card gets drawn every hand you have it does precious little to help has the enemies are not reduced in power or abilities in any way. It becomes slightly harder to make genuine mistakes but your fragile health pool and options against the oppressive enemy force still stack the odds against you. Overall you would think from what i've said so far this game still sounds doable (and to be fair occasionally it is if good luck smiles on you with a amazingly overpowered deck as is the case with many roguelikes) but that the game has a far more noticeable difficulty curve. This would be a fair assessment if not for one last detail that ruins the ENTIRE experience...
The game cheats.
Whether it is due to bugs with the DLC, the utterly unfair number of enemies the game throws at you sometimes, or the fact that the game actually does read your deck and creates situations to screw up your card draws or mobilize enemies against it I can't say for sure but something is wrong here. Particularly in the DLC campaign enemies will just sometimes not damage each other with attacks even if they have no counters or blocks, your automatic movement card seems to pick the worst card for your circumstances, and the enemy AI just ALWAYS picks the exact right movement to do the most damage to you regardless of difficulty. I have spent dozens of hours trying to beat the DLC campaign on multiple difficulty levels and there is little to no clear difference in gameplay save for what was mentioned earlier. This would lead me to believe the game was just not programmed well and/or was intentionally made to be as hard as possible to beat despite already having a play cycle WAY longer than most others of its kind. Even on those rare moments when I had a ridiculously overpowered deck and tear my way through the first two or three level sets with ease, the deck ALWAYS begins to malfunction in the 4th set and final boss set.
Regardless of what kind of build your deck is, how many or how little cards you have, or how specifically tailored you got it for your ideal strategy your draws in the final two areas just start becoming complete crap and it completely ruins your run. The ultimate death note is that even if you're playing on a lower difficulty and can restart individual fights, your deck draws are not re-randomized. You get the exact same cards in the exact same order so if the game puts you in a no-win situation no amount of restarts are going to fix it.
Overall, I can't exactly call this game one of the worst games I have ever played or anything because I did spend just this insane amount of time with it, but I simply won't recommend it to anyone anymore when far superior rogue-likes exist across Steam such as the aforementioned Hades or Slay the Spire that have far more readable and balanced systems that make replaying the game worth it. This game unfortunately is a total crap shoot where sometimes you'll have a blast with a really fun deck, but more often than not will have any attempt you made to win destroyed by things outside your control.
TLDR: Potential for a great deckbuilder ruined by sloppy/inconsistent mechanics and an unbalanced difficulty curve the inherent randomness doesn't allow for you to prepare for. Don't waste as much time as I did.