izigame.me

IT IS EXTREMELY BUGGY. If you are bothered by bugs DO NOT BUY IT!!!! I'm not talking about minor things either, there are serious issues here.

Loading into battles is totally messed up, the following have happened to me while loading in during a battle:
-It removed any recon data I gained previously in the mission.
-All of my NPC allies disappeared during a mission. This was a special mission where the entire point of the mission was to hire them and use them.
-I think some mission specific enemy AI gets screwed up and they simply stand there. Not really sure about this one though.

Aside from this, I have had simple text cutscenes loop infinitely when I load into a save. The map screen has bugged out repeatedly and simply skipped entire dialogue segments. The map screen has also had infinite loops where it shows my destination then kicks me back to town. In short, the map and dialogue is VERY buggy.

The actual battles and mech customization though, the meat and potatoes of this game, is generally bug free.

I am normally not bothered by bugs in games all too much. But this is a bridge too far, even for me. I cannot believe how buggy this is, basic testing would have revealed some of these bugs. I refuse to believe they were not aware of these problems before releasing the game. The lack of QA is kinda pathetic, and the game deserves its "mixed" rating on steam for this.

With this said, I'm still recommending this game simply to encourage them to port the others. The actual game is pretty solid, though it starts off very rough. In the initial missions, when you only have ~4 units, it is EXTREMELY RNG heavy. If you get unlucky you can get crippled during a mission. Because you only have a few units, you can't fully exploit the enemy AP reduction system and bad RNG is more significant. The main "gimmick" outside of the mech customization, is that having your units next to theirs reduces their action points. If you have enough of your units in the right places, you can even make enemies incapable of doing anything at all during their turns. Once you start getting a larger force (up to 15), RNG stops being an issue, and it is way easier to exploit this AP system.

The game does a terrible job explaining what it expects you to do to play well. The game is designed around the AP system. It wants you to surround and enemy, wait a turn, and then attack when they are incapable of returning fire. It also wants you to use long range fire to reduce their AP before short range units go for the kill, that is the real purpose of long range weapons. These two methods are the only way I have found to consistently make things go your way, otherwise RNG will dominate and you will be ground down.

Pro-tip when you hit a difficulty wall: cheese the game with mines. Put a mine down, have the enemy unit step on it and lose its legs. Then move your units away from the enemy group. The enemies will chase, but the unit that lost its legs will only move one square. Repeat enough times and you have split them all up and can do the surrounding and destroying.

Pro-pro-tip: have your long range units carry backpacks with lots of healing items and ammo. Their mobility never matters if you are playing intelligently, so just pack them up as much as you can, give them cheaper lighter legs to compensate and keep them moving enough tiles. You will need the healing to offset RNG BS.