izigame.me

EDIT:
After watching other gameplay and reading some other reviews, I now realize that my understanding of the game is very incorrect. The value of purchasing this isn't the existing pre-loaded campaign, it's the freedom to create your own and play scenarios created by others. I think the purpose of this is closer to a Dungeons and Dragons campaign simulator than it is a developer-content created experience. What I did NOT review involves using community created or expanded campaigns. I do think there's a lot of potential here, but at the same time, that doesn't change the expectation of buying a game, and jumping into a smooth experience.
____
Begin review
This game isn't what I'd hoped it would be. As someone who played Heroes of Hammerwatch, this is my perspective.
Game saves -
Your character only exists in a single save file. Be that either locally or with someone else. You cannot move a single player character to online or vice versa. Nor can you use a character from one save in another save. What this means is that if you join a random online game, you get to create a character at the same level as the party, but you can't take that character into another save. It's nice that the game gives you the character levels, but because the game is more gear-focused for progression, you are still a bit behind even if you "jump in".
Time -
The game has a time mechanic like many other games where day shifts into night, then eventually back to day. This modifies some of the lighting and shading effects, and is genuinely beautiful. It seems like 2 real life seconds are a minute in game. I might be wrong/off, but that's close enough.
The issue with this is that this seems to be an arbitrary hurdle to progression rather than something that adds interesting events or changes to the game. Specifically, many NPCs are only active at certain parts of the day. Notably on the starting island, no NPC is available during the night. If every in-game minute is 2 seconds of time, it can take quite some time to get to the time you want to be at. Ah! But there IS a way to change the time - sleep at the inn! Because sleeping at the inn costs in-game money, this feature isn't available if you have very little gold. Worse, because it is night, you can't sell loot to an NPC to earn enough to skip time. This was a huge problem early on, that after I had a lot of gold, went away. But it's still very annoying to even see.
I will note that some of the quests don't actually need to be started from an NPC to gain progress, but others explicitly do need you to speak to an NPC to receive an item to hand to the next NPC in the quest chain. The other glaring issue is that you cannot turn in quests when the NPCs are asleep at night.
The time mechanic is bewildering in its implementation, and I have to wonder what would happen if the devs changed the NPCs to always be available. What would be the meaning of "night" in the game? What purpose does the time mechanic serve? I didn't play much past the first island before this review, but other than a night/day cycle and the NPC lockout issue, "time of day" seemingly has no "positive" effect on the game. No new effects or enemies. No exciting events. No secrets hidden in the moonlight. There's nothing interesting about night that would encourage me to spend time there. I very much admit I could have missed it, but there is no redeeming feature here.
Starting the game and gameplay -
The game feels very open and appears to give you the choice of how to tackle its various quests through slaying monsters and collecting quest items for NPCs. The combat is quite engaging and can be fun, but it's definitely important to level your health so that some enemies don't immediately flatten you. There definitely feels like risk/reward gameplay here, and I really like that about Hammerwatch II.
I really disliked the user interface for the first 30 minutes or so. It's quite confusing, and the game does not do a good job of introducing all of the features to you. That feeds into my issues listed above with game saves or the time mechanic. If there really are interesting positives here, the "tutorial island" should ideally highlight those, and provide a brief and direct explanation. After a while and through pure blind experimentation, the UI is actually quite robust and provides a lot of customization.
The combat is fun an interesting. I played a couple of different classes to get the feel, and eventually settled on Wizard. The wizard has a powerful ranged attack, and compared to some of the other classes that are more melee focused, seemed to give me more time to breathe and move around to avoid enemies. But when I was playing melee, I was getting killed over and over. Yeah, it's definitely a skill issue, but it's very much easier to play at range in this game. As a paladin, even if you block, many enemies can and will give you damage over time effects. So, it's simply easier to dodge and attack from range.
There are several interesting side-features like fishing, potion making, and enchanting. I hate to hammer (ha) on this again, but although there is a very vague tutorial, how to actually participate in these activities isn't obvious in the beginning. Nor does the game provide good hints for how to progress. For example, the potion maker is the first quest I think most players might find. Great, you can go and do it, come back, and you're given a potion flask. But... no charges for the potion. So, do you need to talk to the NPC to make more? How do you get charges. After playing, there are several ways, but it's odd that you don't seem to get charges on receiving your first potion. Further, the drops for bottles necessary for potion crafting seem VERY rare. I only came across one "large" potion bottle in the tutorial area. Interestingly, "large" is the smallest potion bottle size. Where are the smalls and mediums? Why does it start at large? Just another odd quirk of this game.
And to highlight another strange feature, there are "hookshots" in the game, and points to use them throughout the first island. However, you don't get the hookshot for quite some time. It seems odd to place items just out of reach in early areas. Maybe the intention is for people to come back and re-explore, but given the random drops I've received, there's no guarantee the item you spent 10 minutes backtracking to find will have real value.
I finished the main island in my time, and there are definitely a few rough difficulty jumps that the game doesn't alert you to. I set out to explore early on and learned that lesson. If you stray in the wrong direction, expect to face very tough enemies if you move too far outside of where the game expects you to go.
One other odd quirk is that there is no "fast exit" feature for dungeons. Once you've killed the boss, you have to backtrack all the way out of the dungeon. Many modern games have a small teleport square or secret passageway that opens up. This is basic modern game design that doesn't exist.
As a mild spoiler, you finally gain the ability to travel off of the island. I was very excited to do this, and when I was ready, headed to the ship... only to be told it's "too late in the day" to sail.
I closed the game after that.