izigame.me

There's the bones of a solid game here, what's there is fun and engaging, but it's just too little, too small in scope rn to recommend at full price. After 11 hours playing, and a lot of that spent with tinkering and experimenting, I just had the disappointing realization that I've seen everything this game has to offer. There's nothing new under the sun, here.
You can build a modest sized village, but beyond that it's just repetition and scaling up the same build over and over. Resource management is rather shallow and you'll only ever have a few industries in your town, with no real need to expand them beyond basic levels of production. The tech tree, while having some cool techs and buffs, is small, and can be fully queued up and upgraded in one go once you get your production off the ground, meaning there's a tendency to go from no tech to full tech pretty quickly. The same thing for weapons upgrades. But once you're fully teched there's not really anything different to do, your builds don't change and nothing particularly game changing is unlocked, you mainly just get buffed. Nice and all, but you quickly begin to realize that each game is just kind of repeating the same basic steps, and those steps don't take very long to complete, so the entire gameplay loop feels almost condensed or "abridged" in some sense. I guess this is an issue of both the amount of content, and just the overall pacing of how that content is spread out. Some things are indeed gated in game, so there is an attempt at creating a sense of progression, but the reality is it's just so easy to unlock everything relatively quickly that instead of an organic and engaging sense of progression it feels more like "warping" through stages of the game like so: you get your production set up all at once, your housing/population center all at once, you build your army all at once, you max your tech all at once, you scour the map, game over you win.
The AI also leaves a lot to be desired. On harder difficulties the AI will launch seaborne attacks and be more aggressive generally. This can pose a challenge in the early game if the AI is more established than you, but it's mostly easily dealt with with a couple towers and some town militia. It's usually easy to put off building your military until later in the game because of this, meaning you can play quite greedily and get your economy going strong even against very hard AI. Once your economy is humming, it's quite simple to sweep the map. The AI will mount only a token defense, and won't use any kinds of formations or tactics but will charge piecemeal against a line of Huscarls or Shield-Bearers with archer support. Once their army is defeated they'll spam militia which are easily dealt with and your army can rapidly destroy the AI town with impunity. True to form, the most threatening thing you will probably face is enemy towers, but they can also be overwhelmed quite quickly.
All in all, it's probably unfair for me to say I've seen "everything" in 11 hours. There are indeed other game modes I can try out, and more campaign for me to do. But I do feel like I've seen the entire gameplay loop from start to finish several times over already, and it's hard to get too excited about just repeating this same overall strategy over and over again when it can be done so quickly and easily.
These are just my impressions, and I don't mean to be overly negative. I don't regret my purchase, I got it on sale myself and have had fun with it, I just wish there was a lot more fun to be had out of this game right now. With active development and another year or two this game could turn into something much more satisfying, so I will stay tuned, but for now, that's my advice for prospective buyers as well. Don't write this game off, it's got potential and what's there is good, but just stay tuned and wait for more, it's still got a ways to go.