izigame.me

I played this game 4 years ago when I first saw it getting hype. I just picked it up again due to some friends playing it recently. From what I can tell they have added more building options, a few new animals, and possibly expanded the map. Thats a pretty slow timeline to push out content, which in itself is not bad, but while looking for some base locations and general info on the game I came across their 'Final Update' announcement they made back in Sept. of '24.
To put things bluntly, this game is not finished. After the initial learning curve, and its a big one (at least for a survival game), the content is incredibly sparse but inflated with grind mechanics, the game is still riddled with bugs, and it has many other mechanics that have barely been touched upon, much less fleshed out. They still have items on their trello and road map that they have not implemented.
It still plays like an early access game. It just does not feel any different than it did when I picked it up years ago and I honestly believe if you had me play each of them side by side, I couldn't tell you the difference. If they release paid DLC in the future after finishing StarRupture, I'm not inclined to buy because it should have been in the game already. Anything they have added can be sorted through in about 5 minutes of playtime. The updates did not keep players satisfied because they were so spread out and so lacking. There's a reason most of the reviewers on this game have between 15 and 30 hours. The game has no depth to it outside the initial learning curve. It started as a shallow puddle and ended as a slightly bigger shallow puddle.
There's also the issue of them rejecting things players want, like adding in support for dedicated servers, mods, having consoles and PC on the same game version, cross-platform capability, adjusting game balance or even just a toggle in the settings menu for options like disabling specific sounds. Also where are the anacondas? They were added to the trello back in 2020. I feel like any half decent dev team could pull it off and would have done so much quicker. This game is not Minecraft. You have to add content to it more than once a year, AND have that content be something players can chew on for a bit before your next update AND add various support to keep it relevant. Thats why a game that has sold 5+ million copies is averaging 1-2k players a month and only seeing an increase when there are updates before immediately falling back down.
At the end of the day, they didn't drop a scam game and dip, but they also did not improve the game in any meaningful way. This game could have been great. A rival to The Forest and some other survival classics, and actually was for a short while, but the devs just simply did not do enough and abandoned the game. I could justify paying a whopping $9 for this game (its current price) but I can not justify almost $30. There are to many games out there that offer the same or similar experience for half the usual cost of this one.