izigame.me

Have you ever wanted to babysit a mediocre idle game? Then this might be worth picking up!
I convinced a friend with whom I've played a bunch of survival games to play this with me, because it has overwhelmingly positive reviews and was 40% off in the steam sale, and its concept seems fantastic.
In practice, this game's core concept *is* fantastic. Watching the world change around you as a result of your actions and efforts feels incredibly rewarding. But it's either deeply unfinished or a finished version of a poorly-conceived vision; signs of promise have proven unfulfilled so far, and we're done blindly hoping the next thing we'll find will be better.
Let's start with the killer: the core systems. They're bad. There are long periods of mostly waiting. You ask yourself "What can I do right now?" You scour your options and conclude correctly that the best you can do is incremental improvements that make the waiting slightly faster. Everything takes too long. Even in the first stage of the game, the exploration was getting pretty tedious. We were close to the next stage. We assumed it was a one-off mistake of pacing and that it would be better. This problem is constant. Whenever you're not finding something qualitatively new, you're doing a lot of the same. The samey thing that you're doing changes depending on the game stage but that doesn't matter; it's all the same sameyness. Everything you do is in search of making one of a handful of numbers go up; the answer to your questions is always either "more" or "wait" and the upgrades you get in pursuit of that are almost always "more" rather than "here's a new challenge to figure out."
The upgrades are meaningless and lack qualitative oomph. In fact, almost everything in the game, as far as we've played, lacks qualitative oomph. The game has an incredible amount of content and figuring out how to use it effectively isn't very interesting. You use your resources to make more of the stuff you need to get more resources to make more of the stuff you need. The things you get interact in simple additive or multiplicative ways, and they're usually underwhelming as well. The tiers of hand-mining upgrades are 10% increments. You don't really do that much hand mining and this is a pitiful improvement per tier. There's a jetpack. It pretty much invalidates the movement speed upgrades, and doesn't work anywhere close to how you'd think a jetpack would work because the game isn't designed to accommodate its existence. There's a tier 2 jetpack. It's almost an unnoticeable improvement. There's a tier 2 flashlight upgrade. Why is there a tier 2 flashlight upgrade? There's an upgrade that takes up an equipment slot that lets you pin recipes. Why? How does this exist? The oxygen capacity upgrades are nice. They're a little too nice, in fact; using an extremely plentiful resource, you can make oxygen canisters and easily go to most places in the map which is much larger than it needs to be and which gets very tedious to traverse.
Quality of life is sorely lacking. The inventory system is bad. You need so much of so many different things and the space limitations don't meaningfully improve the game. You get backpack upgrades, at least, but you're still moving things back and forth across long distances almost constantly. Not that it matters - you're still spending an incredible amount of time just moving resources back and forth. You can't sort items into their right places in any way except manually. You can't get items for recipes in any way except manually. Most menus boot you out of them the moment you do anything; sometimes you can hold ctrl to prevent this. Not always.
The building system is sloppily-implemented. Everything that you think should be there isn't. The stairs look bad if you use more than one. The ladders can't stack. There are two shapes of living compartment, and you can't put glass on the ceiling or floor or one of them. The 2x2 living compartment only exists to account for the fact that putting a 2x2 square of living compartments inexplicably leaves these big ugly corners that you can't jetpack past and just look bad. Just make that the way they connect always. The textures are right there in the game. The scaffold blocks look bad in most contexts. There are many, many things that you sort of just have to plop down outside. And on the whole, very few tools are actually present for making your base look distinct and interesting.
The exploration doesn't feel meaningful. It looks cool, but beyond the start, every area you find the very same random recipe chips and similar resources; there are exceptions, but the exceptions are all "a different kinda cool looking area with a different resource that's particular to this area." Nothing more interesting than that. No unique ways of gathering those resources. It's fun at the start, then you get the jetpack and suddenly you can explore almost the entire map pretty easily with no way to actually use many of the resources you find.
What we've seen of the story isn't very good. It's a faint imitation of Subnautica's story, which was one of that game's weaker aspects. In fact, a lot of this game is a poorly-executed imitation of either Subnautica or Astroneer.
The art team wasn't slacking. This game looks quite good. The environments are neat and the terrain is interesting. The changes the environment undergoes in response to your actions are consistently satisfying to see.
I won't make a pile of miscellaneous nitpicks because it could go on forever. There are lots of cool ideas but their density is too low and the core gameplay is weak. If there is more more depth and density of interest to this game than what we've seen, then it's inexcusable that it takes so long to reach, and the pieces which are dead easy to improve somehow greatly outnumber the rest. So far, it's been nothing but a series of promising let-downs. This is the skeleton of a good game and because of that it can still be a good game, but right now it isn't.