izigame.me

Typically, I write a review AFTER I beat the game, but I'm nearing the final fight so I thought I would go ahead and put this out:
YES, I would recommend to players, at full price, who are itching for a unique Boomer Shooter Roguelike experience, however if it only partially interests you, play the demo or wait
PROS:
+LOTS of weapons
+LOTS of weapon modifiers
+LOTS of levels
+LOTS of upgrades
+General gameplay is pretty fast and addictive
+Hospital hub is spooky but fun to explore and acts as a nice reward when something happens in it, either giving lore or a new room to look at or even a new gamemode
+Large variety of levels and themes which is really impressive
+Room generation is fairly "Smart" so you will only get beatable levels. This is a thing other games at the same price point fail to do so it's quite impressive given how small the dev team is
+For my playthrough it's about 20 hours to get to the end of the mainstory, however you can easily add or subtract a few hours as a result of the RNG, so for a buck per hour that's a really good exchange rate, especially since the game is more often fun and engaging than not
+Graphically you can make the game as retro or as "Modern" looking as you want with some pretty advanced and nice lighting effects
+Powerups are all very useful, effective, and unique. I only wish I could end them early as getting a time slow in a wave based arena inbetween waves is just awful.
+You can both play AND disable the leveling minigames
EDIT:
+You can turn off basically EVERY UPGRADE in the game menu, and while I think the game is just base too bright, there's options for THAT too!
+You can turn on automatic for every weapon!
-CONS-
-Enemy variety is pretty low. By the end stages the game starts to introduce more and more hitscan enemies but for the most part they tend to come in one set of small flavors throughout the game, never really doing anything bonkers or new until the final act
-Weapon limit at the start, restricting you to A gun, then TWO, for long stretches, feels awful
-RNG level design makes secret hunting EXTREMELY boring and annoying to do. Granted it took nearly 20 hours of pretty strict gameplay to find a repeat of a secret, but by that point I had seen so many repeat rooms I just can't even describe most of the worlds
-Some weapon modifiers make weapons particularly garbage even if THEORETICALLY they could be a straight improvement, such as random projectile sometimes giving you giant balls that can kill you, or fire particles, or the meh option of just shooting explosive barrels. Due to this I basically stuck with an Explosive Ammo lvl 2 Super Shotgun for 2 worlds in a row and countless 20~ minute arenas because nothing was going to be better than that ONE modifier on that ONE gun, making it useful in nearly every situation. But when I did, finally, just swap it out cause I got bored for an SMG my low ammo limit, even late into the game, made me die several times in a row to an arena section
-This game is at it's best when you are basically mindlessly shooting down a corridor or given a handcrafted, large arena to fight in. But when it's a randomly generated forced arena with red enemy spawning crystals the game becomes nigh unplayable as you can no longer set any rules for engagement, just hoping that the game doesn't spawn the several different varieties of ranged damage melting ontop of you once you enter the room. On the other end, the amount of times I cleared rooms by just purposefully shooting an explosive shotgun down a hallway was... Not great.
-Music wise it really feels like there is ONE track that gets repeated infinitely which is a little boring after a while. There is other songs and they all rock so that's nice.
-There's 3 different leveling trees: One which just takes coins from main levels, the next that only gives coins on completed main levels, and jade coins from arena wins. I would legit say that the progression on the Jade tree is just awful as you will constantly lose track of the last shop you were buying upgrades in, Topaz has incredibly slow progression which doesn't help as you get it after the gold coins but before jade with no clear way to speed that leveling up, finally with the original gold coin tree which inflates to such a degree that you will both never run out of money for things to spend in levels while having to get a comical 3mil to buy AN upgrade, a thing you can buy 2 to 3 of if you've been a good little completionist. I don't dislike the leveling system persay, I just hate how weak you are to start and how slow feeling it is while the game can quickly get stagnant if you get lucky.
-Completionism means a ton of money and more weapons therefore more upgrades, however due to the randomized nature and the fact that there is not only 3 keys in each level, by the second act with it's own, unique hub world, you're introduced to explosives which are like a key but for blowing up a wall, and a battery you have to move to the specific switch to do a specific thing in the level like open a door or raise a lift so you can access a secret, and by the final world they introduce a barnacle that you have to toss a glowing gem into in order to get another RANDOM key of the Battery or C4 variety which feels ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE. I spent way too much time fiddling with these optional secret things for a few extra coin and I wouldn't recommend it. You can waste an eternity just sprinting around looking for that ONE randomly placed item to get some low amounts of extra cash, it's straight awful.
Oddities:
?Real easy to lag even strong PC's with certain combo's of effects which is both expected and a bit annoying. Specifically, shotgun + explosive shell = low framerate mode. NEVER had a crash which is good though
?You get a lot of your mobility options late, similar to how it takes a long time to get your multiple weapon slots, which again just doesn't feel all that great, but with the movement in particular you can do some wacky fun stuff that's heavily restricted by the time you get the ability to grappel hook like crazy
?Time slow on dodge upgrade feels like it should happen AFTER you dodge, not before so you can actually take advantage of it but eh, it's fine