izigame.me

It's worth checking out, and I wouldn't advise against getting it on sale. But man the game is ROUGH. Not as in it's hard, but that there are many instances of poor design. Especially in Chapter 2, which is where I lost interest in completing it entirely. I'm marking it as "not recommended" but if Steam had a "mixed" button I would choose that instead. I'll just provide a list of things the game did right and a list of my criticisms so that the customer can make a somewhat informed decision before purchasing and come to their own conclusion based on what I've written here. Here's a list of the pros first:
+ good art style/design. The gorgeous aesthetics are the best part of the game in my opinion.
+ BANGER soundtrack (but you need to crank up the volume a ton to hear it).
+ interesting setting
+ good enemy variety (there are more enemy types than just "guys who shoot you with guns" at least)
+ ammunition is rare but never too rare, meaning that the player has to be smart about their resources but never finds themselves without anything to use. This adds a second major element to the game: resource management. This encourages exploration to find resources and allows the game to not just be endless combat.
+ The game doesn't throw endless gauntlets full of annoying enemies at you like other boomer shooters do.
Now here are some of my complaints:
- Many weapons are genuinely bad and not fun to use:
* The ranged weapons are too slow and do too little damage.
*The pistol is very weak and will likely get you killed using it.
*The base shotgun has only slightly better range than the Doom 3 shotgun.
*The grenade has a weird throwing arc. Also, you don't even get grenades for 1/3 of the game (!!!). I can't remember
the last time a first person shooter has done that, I mean grenades are as much a staple in the genre as shotguns.
*The AR is pretty weak and only useful if you go full auto.
*The Double barrel shotgun is the only good weapon in the game as far as Chapter 1-2 goes.
- Your armor is as effective as paper and your health depletes pretty fast. The game isn't difficult, but that's because of the high prevalence of armor and health. Don't play this game on hard mode.
- Many enemy types are annoying to deal with. Rats, drones, turrets, and armored shot gunners are all horrible to fight for exactly the reasons you'd suspect. Rats are too hard to hit. Turrets are tanky and do too much damage. Drones fly everywhere and all of your weapons have crappy accuracy at a distance above 8 feet so they are harder to kill than they need to be (they also hit like a truck). Armored shotgunners are an enemy type where - get this - headshots are less effective than arm shots. Oh and you only have your nerf pistol and DB with maybe 4 shells to deal with him. And some grenades too.
- The game expects you to rely on that pistol it gives you. An Airsoft gun would have been more effective.
- Headshots don't instantly kill even the weakest enemy type. Only rats die in one shot from anything.
- Chapter 1 has its own On A Rail section during the penultimate level of Chapter 1 ( i think, it may be earlier. I can't recall). It's better than HL1's On A Rail chapter, only because its linear and over with quickly.
- Chapter 2 takes away all of your weapons just to give them back slowly. Why.
- Chapter 2 then makes you fight a crapton of enemies. Without most of your weapons.
- Chapter 2's chain puzzle. If it isn't enough that it can be glitched out and force you to restart checkpoint, you have to do the same thing at least THREE times. Why would you have the player do the same puzzle multiple times back to back?! Especially since the first one breaks if a drone lands the wrong way.
- For the entirety of Chapter 1, the story is not told through characters or events that occur in the game, but instead through readables and some sort of Youtube analog horror cut scene at the end of it. The result is that there is pretty much not a narrative and no characters. For some, this is irrelevant. But in my opinion the game play alone doesn't carry the experience because the shooting sucks. Imagine if in Doom every gun was only a little more effective than the base pistol.
- It's a Half-Like but you can't save anywhere. You must rely on autosaves. Not normally a negative but you'll be repeating sections you shouldn't have to often if you die a lot.
- The game encourages you to stay mobile. Enemies charge your position, you have the opportunity to dodge most ranged attacks by moving out of the way, half the enemies that appear are melee types, and in general standing still or trying to shoot from cover will cause you to lose. But the game DRAMATICALLY reduces your accuracy when you move, making your already barely functional weapons effectively useless.
- Tell me why there are multiple factions of enemies in the game but you never see them fight each other. Are the mindless mutants, the robots, the facility's automated security system, the various guards scattered around the levels, and the rats all working together to kill one man? Did the mutant rats sign some sort of peace deal with the security drones or the facility's staff? Why does everyone hate the player so much, is it because of a plot reason that's demonstrated in an analog horror cut scene in Chapter 2? Watching NPCs fight is always fun in any game, and is a defining moment of shooters from the 2000s. This technology has been around since, like, the Doom days. Or Half Life 1. But if for whatever reason it's needlessly difficult or resource exhaustive to program that (which is very understandable), at least keeping their appearances separate to sell the illusion that they aren't all working together to kill the player specifically would be nice! Why are mutant rats, a bunch of security guards, and automated security drones all chilling in a random room together until the player shows up?
Once again note that I did not complete the game. The latter part of Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 may be the best part of the game but I wouldn't know. If you want to check it out, 20$ isn't too bad of a price so you won't be down much if you don't like it. If you ask me though, I would personally recommend avoiding the game.