izigame.me

The game has mixed reviews at the time of writing. That seems unwarranted to me, especially for certain groups of potential players. If I didn't buy this at day 1, I would have skipped it because of the reviews. Which would be a mistake, as this is the best game I have played in the last few years.
I am a person who likes old RPGs (like Baldur's Gate 2, Fallout 1 and 2, Diablo 2), and dislikes most newer games. I never played any of the other games from this developer. If you are similar, your should probably disregard the negative reviews.
I played the game as Wizard on Normal difficulty, single-player. It took about 27 hours to finish, while not being perfectionist about finishing every side-quest and opening every chest.
The most fun part of the game is the combat. The movement, abilities, aiming, enemies, and bosses all feel close to perfectly designed to me. Combat is also the activity that takes up 90% of the game time.
The story and plot are written tongue in cheek. Much of the texts seem to be meant as slightly humorous or outright jokes. I thought I would dislike this aspect, but I quickly adapted and now actually prefer it this way. In this context I consider the game to be well written. I skipped a lot of the longer side-quest texts though.
I will comment on some of the issues most commonly mentioned in negative reviews as I think they are often misleading:
- "Multiplayer saves are stored on the host computer (characters cannot jump between games)". I read the steam forum discussions leading up to the release of the game, and most of the early negative reviews seem to be a revenge from a vocal minority who demanded the multiplayer architecture to be changed a few weeks before release. This is a non-issue if you play solo, or plan to play the game over a weekend-long LAN party. Even if you play online with your friends, I expect most players not to mind, as this is not some 300-hour game where you will cherish you character for years to come. The game is definitely not meant to be played with random strangers.
- "Some quests can time out". I had zero timed-out quests. Really not hard to avoid if you don't immediately accept (and then forget about) every quest you come across.
- "Not enough instructions for quests". Similar as with the timed quests - if you don't mindlessly accept every quest you encounter without reading, you will likely have zero issues with this, especially if you ever played older games.
- "Day/night cycle is sucks". I agree the cycle has no real purpose in this game. This is at most a slight annoyance though. The day/night cycle only matters in towns (because of NPC schedules) and there is always a sleeping zone at most 30 seconds away from you (costing negligible amount of gold). I would personally leave this feature out of the game, but it is not really an big issue.
- "Losing gold on death". I like having a penalty for death. It makes the combat even more fun. I would even prefer experience loss instead of gold loss, as the gold loss can be easily avoided. It is easy to get rid of gold before going into difficult locations. You don't even have to sell any items for gold until you actually need some gold, since the inventory capacity is infinite(?). Thus losing significant amounts of gold to death is just incompetence.
- "A lot of meaningless caves/dungeons". Most of the side-caves contain hidden rooms (often multiple) with chests dropping strong loot. I like this design very much. I suspect the people who complain about this don't realize there are hidden rooms or don't know how to look for them. There is a non-optional hidden room in the first 5-minutes of the game to let people know about this feature, so I don't have much sympathy for the complaints.
- "A lot of backtracking over already cleared dungeons". This is true, but not a big issue for me. The map designers often tried to provide shortcuts for repeated traversals, but it takes non-trivial mental effort to remember the shortcuts in some of the larger, multi-level dungeons. This was only a bit annoying for me in the late-game troll caves, which I had to cross several times after completely clearing them. Overall not a big issue unless your attention span is severely impaired.
- "Crashes in loading screens". For me, the game is not really crashing, just sometimes taking a disproportionately long time (20+ seconds) to load in some locations. If I interact with the long loading screen (e.g. by clicking), Windows shows the "wait or kill" popup, suggesting the application froze. But if I just wait a bit, it will load successfully. This is a deserved criticism. If the game was crashing as much as it appears, I would not continue playing. Such a technical issue should have been handled better. There is no way beta testers did not encounter this. I understand if fixing the occasional long loads is difficult at this stage. But the developers should have at least put a warning to the loading screen, saying the loading can sometimes take longer and to wait for a minute. By the way, the game did not actually crash for me even once in my almost 30 hours of playtime.
- "Disappearing items when dropped by non-host in multiplayer". I did not play multiplayer yet, so I did not encounter this. But I completely understand giving a negative review because of this. It was a known issue (because of the demo version), mentioned multiple times in the forums, weeks before the launch.
- "Not like the previous Hammerwatch games". I don't care as I didn't play them. On its own, this game is great. I think the developers should have chosen a more distinct naming to avoid the confusion and comparisons.

My biggest issues with the game were:
- The UI could be clearer. For example, the magic item effects are often identified by small pixelated icons, several of which look very similar. Many times I had to search the stats screen to find out which of the icons matched the item's effect. Towards the end of the game I remembered all the relevant icons, but until then it was mildly annoying as it could have easily been avoided by a bit more text in the item tooltips.
- The crafting seemed pointless. I never managed to craft a better item than what I got from loot (except potions). I had tons of various components, but they never seemed to be applicable to the items I tried to craft/enchant, without any explanation of the system. Maybe crafting is more relevant/necessary on higher difficulties?
- The action wheel design is bad and not consistent with the rest of the controls. I had to google how to use a shovel. There is no "dig" option when right clicking the shovel in the inventory. You have to use the action wheel. In the action wheel, the shovel is not under "items", but under "skills" (just why?). The direct "use" option on the shovel in the wheel does not work for me. I had to bind the shovel to a hotkey and use it via the hotkey.
- On one occasion my inventory lost a portion of its contents (several bottom rows of items - where I put my most valuable loot). Fortunately I noticed it quickly and reloaded before the next autosave. If I didn't notice, I would not be happy, as there is only one save slot.

Overall a very enjoyable game with some minor issues that I assume will be fixed soon. Would be a shame if it failed financially because of the initial review bombing by entitled people. Absolutely recommended, especially for players who like older games.