izigame.me

TL;DR This is an unusually conflicted review for me, and the game did keep me interested for most of its duration (which is much shorter than my playtime would indicate, I left it AFK at one point), but I can't recommend it at full price. I got it very cheap on sale personally, and that's what I'd recommend. However, it's overrated in my opinion, and I'll go on to explain why.
PRESENTATION
- The store page is misleading. "Spot and take down targets from afar in Sniper Mode, or engage up-close in front-view, turn-based combat." implies a very interesting tactical option which doesn't exist in the game; Sniper Mode is a minigame which happens three times in the game. Admittedly, it's used very well in the narrative the third time, but it's just a gimmick.
- Nice art. The sprites are especially good, the combat animations are less good. The woman with the shotgun doing a cute cut-in pose when she shoots someone with a certain skill is distractingly inappropriate for the situation; the story tells us she's not inclined to take these things lightly. The music is okay.
- The language barrier being acknowledged is neat. It's only a genuine barrier for very brief periods, and thus doesn't count as a gameplay mechanic, but it's still a nice commitment to the story, unlike "woman does cute pose while shooting someone".
- Portraits and text speed sometimes change mid-dialogue as well as between text boxes, making characters more expressive.

GAMEPLAY
- The combat is very simple and very easy. You can just basic attack through everything, which is not a fast process, and skills won't speed it up much. Some of the boss battles are genuine gameplay, but most of it is grinding. Enemies aren't very varied; they use some flavour of basic attack, and medics might heal or debuff instead.
- The idea of targeting different body parts is a neat mechanic, but it's not used for anything interesting at any part of the game, which is a pretty big letdown considering that's something even old RPGs knew how to do. Throughout the whole game I never once inflicted paralysis by attacking parts which supposedly have a chance of doing so- although I did stop doing that after the first 20 times didn't do anything. It's neat that you can choose between loot and SP recovery at the end, though.
- Character progression is interesting. I like the fact that one of the characters is a pacifist and gets their basic attack replaced with a "Boost" command which randomly buffs or heals a character's hp/sp; unfortunately, it's not very useful, due to being totally random. The pacifist does have decent skills, but so do the other characters who can also do damage. They have the virtue of being tanky, but the game is so easy that it doesn't really matter. By the time you're in actual danger, you'll have another tanky character without the restriction. The only time one of my characters dropped to 0 HP was once during the final boss, and by that point there were loads of revival items I could use.
- The combat UI is inefficient. There's free space which could be very easily used to display buffs and debuffs affecting a character. Also, characters and enemies occasionally jump around in the turn order (like an enemy zooming up three places after a player character's attack) for no apparent reason. If that was an intentional mechanic, cool, but it wasn't noted anywhere when it should've been. Also, there's a skill you get lategame which buffs all allies' atk/def/agi, and it gives twelve painfully slow prompts in a row, one per stat per character, before you can do anything.
- The puzzles are both easy and handhold-y. Near the end of the game, I saw clues obviously needing to be used to deduce something as I moved through an area, and when I got to the end I was excited to be able to actually use my brain for once while playing this game, but the characters explicitly tell the player "oh hey, these are the clues for this thing". Puzzles aren't something I'm passionate about, but the ones we get are a little disappointing.
- The quests sure do fetch. Early in the game, they're compelling despite that thanks to the scenario, but it wears off over time. It's convenient that you can see all of an area's quests in your menu as soon as you get there, though it's not always clear at what point they'll become available or you'll miss them forever.
- They do not tell you there's a run button: Shift.
NARRATIVE
- The initial plot twist is not surprising, but it doesn't need to be. I've heard it criticised for being unrealistic that a sniper wouldn't identify the targets they're shooting at before doing so , but as this is a game which deliberately takes inspiration from JRPGs, I can forgive unrealistic elements in the plot... although said plot uses realism to its advantage in other places with its emphasis on language barriers.
- Very light spoilers for the first chapter of the game follow:
At the beginning, there's emotional weight involved. Rourke has unknowingly killed civilians and abandoned his army, and wants to repay the people of Kaliningrad by helping them in various ways. Every errand feels significant, like a piece of his atonement.
After beating one of the first groups of enemies in a fight, your party member says "Don't worry, they're just unconscious". This is mildly exasperating when we've been shooting them, often specifically in the head, for a solid couple of minutes. It's even more annoying because you do kill bosses later, when the story wants us to think you could be magically knocking them out instead without any negative consequences for your goals (with the exception of the final boss, who is the only one you actually have a reason to kill instead of incapacitating).
I don't understand why the story feels the need to give the PCs an easy way out of this while claiming to concern "the horrors of war". Sure, horrible things happen, but only at the hands of the bad guys. Once the protagonist becomes a good guy(TM), he doesn't have to kill people anymore because the plot says so, and his guilt fades quickly instead of being reawoken every time he kills one of his former comrades. There's a line or two about how it's unpleasant to fight his former comrades, but it doesn't actually alter his character. Likewise, when we meet enemies who aren't soldiers, it's not addressed beyond "oh no I sure feel bad that we nonlethally fought civilians".
Because of that, Rourke's increasingly confident moralising to his former comrades is frustrating, because it's only justified thanks to him getting special treatment by the plot. He does deserve to be treated as increasingly heroic, but corners are cut in the story by glossing over the violence being used in the course of the plot, and the absence of consistency is felt. The danger and stakes are similarly inconsistent; at one point, we're surrounded and it means we're captured, at another (very soon afterwards in the plot, so it's not about our improvement in skill) we're surrounded and we fight our way out through conveniently separate waves while half of the enemies wait politely without shooting us.
The story also suffers from under-using your second party member, even when he should absolutely be the one taking the lead with his knowledge, but forgetting about older party members is something classic JRPGs do too, so I can't be too hard on it for that flaw.
I was originally planning to giving this game a positive review, because despite the short length (which I knew about in advance) and flawed combat, it had the heart and the intimacy to be a worthy indie title, and the story kept me engaged. It lost its conviction to engage with what it was depicting, which stripped it of all the poignant resonance it began with. It slowly became wishy-washy by the end of part two, and part three was just me (and the heroes) going through the motions until we beat the final boss.