izigame.me

This will seem very negative, but I genuinely liked the game, I just wanted to point out some of what I thought were weaker areas and possible solutions, unfortunately, steam reviews have to be short, so I have to leave some other stuff out, (all the positive stuff).
The game has a few big problems that I hope the second game will fix. These problems include:
1) annoying boss design
2) some upgrade tree unlocks are almost completely out-shined by others
3) almost useless abilities
4) story could use more explicit direction, coherency, and generally better design (the section will have spoilers, I personally don't know how to do the text option that hides it so just avoid the last section if you care)
1) For the boss design, a lot of the bosses are big enemies (except for one which I liked its gimmick that is found at the end of chapter 4) and all of them will have an increasingly larger health pool. This normally wouldn't be a problem but almost all of the bosses have attacks or events that require you to look away from the boss (except for chapter 4's, that one is great imo), this is shown the worst in the last boss where in order to look at him, you must look up at around a 45 degree angle, but all of his attacks are only telegraphed on the floor with no HUD indicators to show if your are currently in danger. This means you must look away from the boss to dodge his attacks, but the other problem is how quickly the boss will attack you. In terms of difficulty, it's not bad if you were notified better of where these attacks were landing and how to dodge them. This is also coupled with some extremely fast animations that are supposed to telegraph some attacks. This was the main problem with the Ugly Fish boss (hopefully the name is right, it was the 3rd chapter's boss) where it switched between attacks too quickly for you to pay attention to it, the slimes, and the sinking platforms.
2) On my second play-through, I noticed that the skill tree upgrades that let your weapons fire faster were almost always better which is true for
- the pistol (the pistol one is deceptive since the one that fires slower states that it doubles your fire rate)
- the machine gun (although the one that makes it switch to energy is really good too),
- the burst to the full auto gun (the explosive one is not that great since you find other explosive weapons down the line that will mostly be better than this one)
- The plasma rifle (only is better due to the gigantic blast radius of the other option almost always killing you if you're not really far away, to help with that though it has a homing effect but can often miss)
- the harpoon gun is almost always worse than other options, except for one level, in which it is the only weapon you can use.
- the shotgun is great but only for burst damage at close range, it has roughly the same dps as other options and doesn't penetrate enemies
3) The abilities are all almost useless, which include (in order of obtaining them):
(Priest) a healing ability (very useful, but only really tops you off, the best use is to save charges until you are low and believe there are not many hp pickups nearby)
(Reporter) a sword ability that gives damage negation while active and heals on hit (I found it to be way worse than the priest's heal, if you chose specific gun upgrades the damage is not nearly as good and can often end up with you taking more damage than you heal on harder difficulties, also completely useless on most bosses since you can't get close enough or take too much damage)
(Priest) an ability that stuns enemies in front of you (almost always useless, you can kill the enemies faster than it take for you to activate the ability and go back to shooting, the upside is that it can hit multiple enemies, and would be viable if it didn't stop you from shooting, best used to get away from certain enemies)
(Reporter) an ability that stuns enemies all around you (only better than the priest's because it is better suited for panic situations other than the same problems exist)
(priest) invincibility for a short duration (The best ability, you cannot take any damage and allows you to use all the explosive weapons to clear huge crowds late game without concern (I recommend using the worm/slime explosive upgrade on the plasma/electric gun with this, has the most damage and largest area making most of its downsides go away also lets you easily kill late game bosses as you can ignore all of their attacks )
(Reporter) damage enemies close to you (not very useful, might be good in panic situations but is not able to fully kill tanky enemies, the camera is better for this, the range is very short, even at max rank it is not worth running into all the enemies to use it since you will most likely die on harder difficulties)
(Priest) unlimited ammo for a short duration (it was useful once in my game, I ran out of ammo on a certain weapon on a boss, the problem is that the duration is not very long and it does almost nothing since there is an abundance of ammo drops in the game)
(Reporter) slow time (almost as good as priest's 3rd ability, can still be hit, makes hitting fast enemies easier, certainly a good ability, just watch out for the activation time as it's not instant)
5) The story is very forgettable; in my first play-through, when I got to the hospital, the character yelled out the name of your cousin (or uncle, I forget) and I had no idea who that was. They have some cutscenes that give you an idea of what is going on and most of the story found in gameplay is very cryptic. This didn't stop me from guessing the ending when I first heard one of the enemy variants scream "I've been hit" or "Medic" when shot, it would have hidden the ending better if these voices were incoherent since you are supposed to be "the only one with their wits about them" or having them be distorted as the enemy themself can still speak but their body has morphed to make it difficult. The ending is also easy to guess without that since you really are just killing everything you see. Also as a side-note: I hate the female voice, I feel like it doesn't fit, it would be better if they weren't cocky but were actually somewhat fearful or distressed at all, this is in part due to writing and the actual voice itself giving off that tone consistently, I feel it just doesn't fit the setting at all. Back to my point, especially later in the game, it seems like there are random environments, which would work if they went the route of "you can't trust your perception" but for what happens I feel as if the settings should have avoided such obviously outlandish things like (not in actual order) going to the city, to the snowy area, to the advanced lab, to the jungle/swamp-like area, underwater area, to weird space-like area. It should have stayed as a slow corruption, a more insidious change in setting rather than completely changing it at almost every level once you get so far in. This would make the ending (where you're a crazy person) an option, but not the only option, having the idea that the eldritch horrors might be real should be kept up until the end of the game/story which it tried to do, but failed due to the extreme difference in setting from level to level and one enemy's ability to speak perfectly who shows up very often. If the setting changed a lot slower and they added a more fleshy, visceral Filter to their speech then I wouldn't have and probably many others have been able to guess the ending so soon.
Again, I actually liked the game, and noticing that they are working on another game, I wanted to put this out on the off chance that they might see this and take some of the things I mentioned into consideration in the next one.