izigame.me

I honestly can't say I recommend this game. After 3 failed attempts to finishing the main story, I can safely say that this is simply not worth the time it takes to beat.
This game is an endurance-run incarnate. It goes on for way too long, and the only trick the game has up it's sleeve to mitigate that issue, is to make the levels longer and adding backtracking mechanics to make it even longer. The map doesn't help in that regard, since important items, weapons, treasures or anything of significance aren't highlighted or shown on the map, meaning you can spend a while combing the level for the thing you need to progress, while still missing it because the pixel assets bleed into each other in a way that makes certain things almost impossible to spot at a glance.
The combat feels very fast and fun at first, but the longer you play, the more reliant on corner-peaking and slow paced engagement you become. The enemies start hitting so hard you'll die in only a few shots, and with some of them having elemental attacks that slow you, disable your weapons, or simply blind you with the amount of particle effects on screen, the game becomes a cover shooter in a sense where it's just a lot safer and better to engage the enemies from afar. And with how unbalanced some of the weapons are, and how some of them are actually just a straight up downgrade from the standard kick attack, it's hard to engage a fight with any sort of consistency or plan other than to just shoot at them from far away and hope they don't make it to you in time to drain your health bar.
The enemy variety is fun, but the game is quick to add hit-scan enemies and summoners, which quickly flood the room with enemies if they aren't taken care of. I've also encountered an event countless times, where the game spawns a dozen or so summoning gems into a room, with far too much health. Which means by the end of it, I have 5 stunners, 10 hitscanners, and countless other chargers and shockers all swarming towards me.
The level up system is a neat idea at first, with you unlocking traits, buffs and bonuses for yourself by playing a brief yet repetitive sidescroller. The levels all feel similar enough to quickly become bored of them, and with infinite lives and respawns being on every screen, you can't really skip them as they are an essential part of progressing the game. Each one costing around a few thousand coins at the start, but by the end, you're pouring millions of coins and treasures into the smallest, insignificant power-up.
The weapons start out simple enough. Pistols, shotguns, rifles and laser guns being a pretty good standard, but by the end, you're getting bootleg pirate cannon rigs, Bolters from 40k, tesla coil-guns, auto-aim pistols, and the game just starts feeling silly at that point since it keeps giving you the basic weapons from the start of the game. The weapon stats aren't any better either, since some are far better than others, and honestly just add another gimmick to a weapon that is already bordering on being silly. Which usually means there isn't much reason for me to not pick the same weapons over and over again to keep between stages.
The bosses aren't anything to really talk about, since most of them only have around 2-3 attacks, and their difficulty mostly comes from how small their arenas usually are, and what weapons you just happened to get in the level leading up to them.
The levels start out promising with good themes and lovely atmosphere, but as it goes on, you can feel the levels really starting to overuse the same texture. The tilesets for the later levels are mostly comprised of claustrophobic hallways that use the same textures, and caves that have copy/pasted sprites and aesthetics.
I know I have a 100+ hours in this game, but most of those were spent during the early days of the game before the 1.0 release. I spent hours making up new challenge runs for myself,hunting for achievements, and noting down bugs to report, but now that the game is out, I can't even bring myself to finishing it. It goes on for way too long, pads itself out with mindless key hunting and backtracking, and starts feeling repetitive at around the half way mark. You can tell where the new chapters were added in the development phase, as you feel an abrupt flood of new mechanics and level design being dumped on you out of nowhere. I often feel myself not playing this game for months, before seeing it in my library and remembering how fun the first few levels are. And then after a few hours of playing, I remember why I stopped in the first place and the cycle begins anew.
I honestly can't recommend this game on the grounds that it is such a slow and boring grind towards a story the game doesn't seem very interested in telling you, seeing how it's all told through a series of notes after each level, which you could honestly completely miss if you weren't actively looking for it. I know this game has a mode which shortens the game significantly, but that just begs the question why the game doesn't have that be the default experience, while keeping the longer version as an "extended cut" for the players who want more.