izigame.me

Review of the current build (0.22)
Its like Terraria, but Rimworld. Well, actually its a copy of nearly everything Terraria and Rimworld does. BUT that doesn't means its a bad game! It is actually surprising competent and has enough content to keep you invested.
Half of the gameplay loop is basically the same as Terraria, but with no verticality and with an extra horizontal axis.
Cut trees, get rocks, mine ore, build equipment so you can mine the next tier of ore.
The main twist is that the other half of the gameplay is Rimworld.
Build squares, put some furniture, then pay people to live there. Like Terraria, each NPC has a different skill to offer, but most can do the same chores like hauling items, putting stuff in the furnace and harvesting wood/food.
There are no traits like in Terraria or Rimworld, so all NPCs feel the same, they are fine with living near each other and will be happy if you fill their rooms with one of each furniture.
You can travel the world by going near the corners of the map, but that stops being useful after you find one of each biome. There aren't that many (4 total, plus the Dungeon and Pirate Village), so you can easily find some near your spawn, then add fast travel beacons to them once you unlock it.
Each biome has two caves, one normal and one hardmode, where you can find ores, biome loot and some other stuff.
The map generation lacks a bit of variation, there aren't many interesting sights, if any at all, and several times I had chests and other loot containers not spawning because the map generated a lava lake across the loot room.
After a short while, your settlement becomes self-sustaining, so there isn't much to do.
Sometimes a group of raiders shows up. They start easy, but become more and more numerous and well equipped depending of the size of your settlement and equipment. But they are still incredibly dumb.
All enemies in this game have the same AI: take the shortest path toward you, then either use a projectile or try to touch you.
If you build a wall around you settlement, you can easily force them into a death corridor. They can break walls, but they only seem to do so if they can't find a way to reach you.
There are a variety of bosses, but like with enemies, they all suffer from same-y AI. Pretty much every boss uses the same strategy, hover outside melee range, circle you, then spam projectiles.
And I do mean almost every boss.
Some bosses are easy to fight again, but others like the Pirate and the Wizard require you to find another biome, then reach the boss arena. This makes getting their different loot quite annoying.
Because of how enemies and bosses act, melee is pretty much the worse way to play. No wonder that most of the melee weapons become projectiles by the end.
You can bring NPCs with you to help with fights, which scale in dificulty depending of how many NPCs you bring with you, and that also means you have to mine several times more to craft equipment for them, aside the risk of them dying and you having to search for replacements.
Enemies get a bit too hard on the late game, even with the last armor set, plus all armor buffs, plus food buff, plus potion buff, PLUS banner buffs, giving me over 130 armor, some enemies and bosses were still hitting more for over than 50 damage. Your max HP is 300, 350 with a food buff.
You can't destroy projectiles with a weapon and your defensive skills are limited.
While on Terraria you have all that stuff like dashes, building speed, grappling hooks and wings, here you only have ONE action item.
It can be a short dash with cooldown, a short teleport with cooldown, running (something the boots in Terraria did just by walking) or a shield.
Bosses and enemies grow evermore aggressive, so dodging is really limited because of the sheer number of projectiles and enemies around you.
You don't have a long mercy invincibility so its easy to get caught in a barrage of attacks, or even inside the boss itself, and die (specially to the worm boss and the bat swarm boss)
The shield is the best deal by far, but also has it's problems: it slows you down a LOT and it defends to the direction you are walking instead of the direction you are aiming.
You are trying to shoot at the enemy and pull your shield to defend from an attack, only to get your cheeks clapped because you were moving to the left, so your character defends to the left instead of the direction you were aiming and shooting this whole time.
Eventually, I reached the current end game, which are Diablo-like portals you can open, and this is where my opinion of the game got a bit sour:
To get the second to last armor set, you need Slime parts. To get the slime parts, you need to open a tier 2 portal to the slime incursion, and to do that, you need one of the four essences from the tier 1 portals.
The cost to open the tier 2 portal is random, so you can do the first tier 1 portal and it will require the fourth tier 1 portal essence instead.
Not being enough, there are two kinds of missions you can play, killing or mining. One slime material only drops during the killing mission, the other can only be mined on the mining mission.
So now you have 2 layers of RNG to craft the armor. Then, to craft the last armor set, you need the slime essence from the tier 2 portal, but just like that last one, there are two kinds of missions and one special material for each.
Even if you do get the mining mission, you might not get enough for a full set, without taking into account weapons, so you might have to do 2 or more missions to get enough ore.
And that is without saying that you can make weapons and armor for your villagers.
Overall, good game. Has a nice base and can really improve once some quality of life update arrives and the rough edges get fixed.
Its no Terraria, its no Rimworld and its not trying to do anything original, but is still good enough for the price.