izigame.me

Writing this review breaks my heart.
This game should have been perfect for me.
I loved the demo, and played it a good ten times on two different accounts. I had very high hopes. I'm a fan of almost everything this game claims on the tin: selective breeding/gamified eugenics (yikes in the real world, but oh so fun in games like the Crusader Kings series, Massive Chalice or Pokemon), management, number crunch, whimsy, and the option to be really gay and nosy.
It was supposed to scratch an itch tailor-made for people like me.
It's just... not fun. Especially not into the mid and late game.
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But let me start with the PROS:
- Wonderful artistic vision and a very coherent, unique style. I love the villager designs. Absolutely adore them. And the little details of frames, gauges, signs... everything was so cohesive and charming.
- Some cute humour and references, like the matchmaker's name being Tindra.
- Pretty smooth, intuitive mechanics, and despite some issues and cumbersome facets of the UI (like not being able to go from a couple's newly married screen directly to their new house to add bedrooms, and having to memorize their looks and family name to manually find them again among your 92384 homes), it's easy to grasp and run with.
- Underlying complexity. Between traits, stats, genetics, mentorships (and how they themselves are affected by the stats and skills of both master and apprentice) and aspirations, by the time you're 60 years into your game you can be spitting out supervillagers with 4+ stars in their desired skills - as long as you are meticulous and patient. You can play lightly, but you can absolutely go hardcore and make it into a very challenging management game if that's your speed.
- Truly unique genre overlaps.
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CONS:
- THE DATING MINIGAME. The first ten times it's fun. The next 150 it's not. By the end of my 100 year game I had some 50+ single villagers just because I could no longer be bothered to memorize 3 likes and dislikes, press the right sentences, rinse and repeat. It plays like a toddler memory game, and it becomes so, so, SO repetitive, almost nauseating.
Especially with a very big population (when you go over 200-250), where your single villagers pile on very fast and you constantly have to interrupt your game. Every two seconds, you put aside your calculation of where to move guy A since he isn't getting along with guy B at the inn but isn't that great as a jeweller, to sit there and play baby's first memory puzzle. Utterly jarring, immersion breaking.
Maybe create an optional mode where, if two villagers with Good or more compatibility have both been single for over a year they just marry without player intervention? That way you can "punish" the player's inaction and incentivize the player to bother matchmaking if they want to micromanage genetics, but also offer the option for longer, more populated games to take a breather from "memorize these six interests every ten seconds" without it leading to the entire population just sitting and twiddling their thumbs?
- Added to the above complaint is the fact that newly adult villagers will not automatically occupy empty homes, and have to be manually moved into them. Fine when you have 50, not fine when you have 270. Being LITERALLY interrupted ever 2-3 seconds (!!!) to put 18 year olds into empty houses and play my 200th matchmaking Simon Says, my game years 90-100 lasted as long as the entire first 90 years of my game. The game slowed to such a screeching halt that I almost put it down. And I NEVER put games down.
I was yearning to just move along and do the fun parts of the game (move villagers around, look at the traits of my new crop and decide who I might pair with whom or train as what, upgrade things, push friendships...), but instead 80% of what I was doing was excruciating mechanical Turk labour.
The demo never had that problem due to the limited scale, but the devs really need to find ways to work around it so that longer, more populated games don't get slowed to absolute slog. (And a longer, more populated game is where the management side of the game shines the most, so just hard capping pop at 200 or something to cut the slog down will hugely cripple other pleasures of the game).
- A lot of bugs. Events on the minimap where both portraits are of one villager rather than both involved, crashes (still now, after the first few fixes), weird lag on a strong i7 system with great Ram and solid GPU, "forcing" a pregnancy but it suddenly starting to count down from month 5 rather than 9... Just a lack of polish given the number of patches that have already happened.
- Lack of customisation for villagers. A lot of the slog can be bearable if I can be allowed to tweak my people a little and therefore develop investment, but no.
- Very repetitive if charming music.
- Utterly imbalanced game. With a pop of over 250 people, unless my farm was always running on a full five villagers, all with 3.5+ stars (preferably 4+) and good relationships, I was in trouble, even with every single upgrade to the farm as well as the ones in other buildings reducing food costs.
Fishing however? Four people, moderately upgraded, never strained.
Similarly to the above example, a lot of the production "math" was weirdly slanted in favour of or against certain professions, or created weird and uneven pressures. It made no sense whatsoever that one of five "pranksters" dying was a huge and urgent social problem, but sure, my mines are half empty and that's not much of an issue, really.
- WHACK social demographics.
Generally the way that production buildings could be updated, with efficiency, cost and quality of life improved, but the "illicit" jobs couldn't be optimised, meant that in the mid game you ended up needing like... five prostitutes but only three farmers or two lumberjacks.
Or needing more assassins in your city than truly backbone agrarian labourers like cow herders, or core craft jobs like masons.
Having a population that was 70% sex workers, thieves, killers, gamblers and rat trainers was a very bizarre mid game, and honestly it kind of clashed with the aesthetic tone of the game being all whimsy, cottagecore and pastel queer. I was in charge of a goddamn Sanrio version of Necromunda over here.
Not a huge deal, but another example of the game needing some mechanical and mathematical polish to hit a good sense of balance.
- Genetics... need a bit of work to be worth bothering with, and it's a shame because it's a mechanic I generally love. I know that recent patches are already on it, but it feels very meaningless to be encouraged to micromanage your villagers' reproduction only for it to, more often than not, yield nothing better than complete randomness might have.
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Please, do something to make the game playable after the 60 or so year mark, and I will amend this review, I swear it.
This game IS for me. I am a sucker for almost everything it's trying to do. I beg you, tweak it just the little bit it needs to cross the line from slog to splash.
I should have been your biggest fan, darnit.