izigame.me

The game is great, but I feel like there's a lot of harsh truths and reasonable concerns with it that are getting drowned out by the typical wave of public approval or disapproval I want to make clear.
On the bright side, this game is much better designed than it's predecessor. My only real issue is I feel certain aspects of the movement could be faster, like it's predecessor, but the slower speed and better designed movements are overall a net positive that makes the game much more interesting than the Nair central that was NASB 1. Character movesets have gone from boring flavors of youtube highlight reel to actual archetypes and gameplans, and a lot of them like Plankton or Angry Beavers especially have that Ludosity flair to them that made Slap City so special. This doesn't come at the expense of combos or hype moments either, and the expansion of movesets and reintroduction of mechanics like shield breaking makes this super mechanically solid compared to how the average non-smash platform fighter tends to give characters less options in their moveset like Rivals. The slime meter is also an amazing inclusion most people are probably wondering why nobody else tried yet.
Additionally, the online is great, the singleplayer is... not necessarily my thing, but at least probably the most fun platformer fighter single player aside from Subspace Emissary I've played due to trying to give the gameplay loop some extra meat with the roguelike item systems and pathing, and the visuals stand out as not amazing but great. Some characters look incredible like El Tigre or Ren and Stimpy, whereas there are a lot of assets that just feel crusty like Zim's render or Danny's model.
The flaws: I could not blame someone for not wanting to support this on principle. Taking the money of both a full priced previous entry and DLC and effectively running to make a sequel that has another $50 price tag is painful. It's especially frustrating because this feels like the game that 1 should have been, so as much as I'd love to ask people to try it and hope the game stays alive, I could never say feeling scammed is wrong. Similarly, it has some release bugs and jank. I personally have not run into any gamebreaking ones, but for a list of the most notable ones:
- No explicit way to rebind controls in single player (it uses the last profile you configured to P1)
- Online will constantly and randomly boot me from lobbies during the matchmaking part. Not during matches, but I usually have to repeatedly attempt to get into matches until it finally works properly.
- Unranked options are not good. It's a lot like smash where you just don't have any sort of executive control over what kind of maps or rules you'll be dealing with, which isn't bad as it's own thing but I believe there should always be an equivalent 1v1 queue for both ranked and unranked.
- The training mode is way better than any other platform fighter I've tried in a lot of areas, yet has utterly bizarre blindspots. No way to force the AI to do specific actions (jump, run, shield, dodge) and I'm not sure if I'm missing something but even on characters with specific gimmicks the character-specific options just do not seem to open. It might be reserved to only a couple of characters and just not apply to the ones I've tried, but considering the characters I've tried have their own mechanics, like Zim, I would call that a flaw.
Overall, I think you do get what you paid for if you're coming into it fresh, but for someone who played 1 it'd be a really hard sell and I wouldn't blame you for it. I'm hoping this game can survive till the point where sales can make it more manageable or something nice like a discount for 1 owners could be worked out.