izigame.me

I want to recommend this game, but I honestly can't. For everything this game gets right, it gets two other things wrong. It's clear to me what kind of game this wants to be, but actually going through it tells me there is no understanding of what makes these games engaging and what gives them depth. There's a lot to say about it.
The setting and story are good, and to be honest the only reason I finished the game. It's nothing extraordinary, but it was interesting enough. The soundtrack is excellent too.
I really liked the Unity system for combat. It rewards good gameplay beyond just getting a high score for the fight, and it meshes well with the development of Briar & Lute as characters. Being able to pull off Rapture at full unity is really fun.
Unfortunately, Rapture is about the only time the combat actually *feels* good, because during it you aren't dealing with most of the issues described below. Mobility is great, attacks feel powerful, and it just lets you go nuts beating things up.
Now to the bad stuff.
Much like others have complained, the camera is quite bad. Your field of view during combat is quite narrow, and offers very poor situational awareness. Enemies frequently attack you off-screen and out of view. Some enemies move around a lot, and you spend a lot of time just looking for them.
There is lock-on, which offers additional info such as health and armor, but locking on often does more harm than good. Mobile enemies will end up jerking your camera around and it's very disorienting. Many fights mid to late game will have your target priorities change mid-fight, and getting the lock-on to focus on the right enemy is very difficult, so you're better off just using the free camera.
Even outside of combat, the camera can be a problem. The camera view is a bit more 'cinematic', usually far away with a wide view of the room/area you are in. But sometimes there are platforming segments where your static perspective makes it very hard to gauge where your character actually is, and makes it very easy to miss certain jumps.
That being said, you do get used to the camera. It's not the worst part; the combat is. It boggles my mind to set out to make a game in a genre where the combat is the defining feature, and make it an absolutely dreadful experience.
The red/blue aura system is by far the worst aspect of this game. It functions perfectly fine during exploration, but should have never been a part of combat.
Basically you sometimes get blue or red enemies that require you to use Lute to turn on a blue or red aura in order to damage them. You can only have one of these auras on at a given time, and having an aura on increases Entropy, which bad things happen if Entropy gets too high. The game frequently mixes red & blue enemies in the same fight, some red enemies even spawn blue ones that must be killed to 'finish' the red one.
So you're frequently in situations where you can damage some enemies, but not others, which makes combat tedious and extremely frustrating. And on top of that, you have to pay attention to Entropy and make sure it doesn't get too high. Damaging enemies helps to keep Entropy down, but sometimes you end up having to turn off the aura to let Entropy decay, which halts the flow of combat since not having an aura keeps you from damaging most of the enemies in the game.
On top of that, the game eventually introduces environmental hazards, essentially mines, that will explode if you are using an aura, which feels like punishment for using a mechanic that the game forces you to use in nearly every fight.
The red/blue system did not work in DmC, and it does not work here. It does not add depth to the combat, it just makes it incredibly frustrating. Getting rid of it would improve the game drastically, and I would definitely be writing a recommendation right now.
Speaking of frustrating, defensive options in this game are... odd. Lute functions as your protection in this game; when enemies attack you, a button prompt appears for Lute to protect you from the attack.
The thing is when you hit the button prompt, you don't really know *how* Lute will protect you. She can deflect projectiles and interrupt enemy attacks, but she can also deflect attacks as they hit you, or 'slow' the enemy mid-swing, which does not prevent damage, just delays the attack for a second or two. And you don't know which it will be when you prompt Lute to protect you.
Lute also has limits to how many attacks she can protect you from in a given timespan, so she can get overwhelmed if there's too much going on. From mid to late game, there's usually enough enemies in an encounter where this is always a possibility.
These quirks to defense in combat mean that you are almost always taking stray hits, since you end up pressing the button prompts for Lute to stop attacks and just hoping for the best. There is a dodge button, but it doesn't flow well during combat and is usually a last resort.
Also, some attacks are completely unblockable by Lute, which is fun.
The weapons are cool, thematically at least. They kind of end up feeling the same, since they all have a combo, an alternate combo, most have launchers and an airborne slam, etc. Each weapon has certain enemy types that it does extra damage against, but the game does a very poor job of defining what enemies fit into which category. Some are intuitive, such as 'flying' or 'armored', but others aren't. What enemies are 'ferocious' or 'resilient'? You can look up these details in the game's codex/bestiary if you really want to find this information, but most players are not going to do that.
One complaint I do have about the weapons, is the fact that the Ashen Vindicator, your greatsword that you *always* have equipped, has the smallest moveset among all your weapons. It only gets 2 upgrades: an alternate combo and a stinger-style dashing stab. That's it. And you get those two upgrades at the very start of the game since you have nothing else to buy. Why does the one weapon you WILL be using the most have the least amount of depth? It's bizarre.
Visually, the enemies you fight are cool and interesting. Some enemies kind of waste your time in combat, as some will frequently teleport away from you, forcing you to look for them and close the gap. The game offers very little in terms of mobility, which makes some fights a constant chase just to get a few swings in before the enemy teleports again. One enemy even occasionally burrows underground just to run around the room, and you have to wait for it to surface again to keep fighting it. What a waste of the player's time. Some of the lighter flying enemies you frequently launch out of your own attack range.
The boss fights are some of the best combat experiences in the game, because you get to really focus on the combat and comboing without dealing with camera issues or juggling red/blue auras.
Unity, which is a gauge you build up by performing fresh combos and executing Lute's defensive options well, should be the defining part of the combat experience, but all the other described issues mean you're constantly distracted from focusing on it.
Getting hit drops your Unity significantly, and the flakiness of Lute's protections mean that this can happen frequently and not really feel like it's your fault. The player should be focusing on juggling and mixing weapons to build Unity with good combos, but the only thing they end up juggling is whether the red or blue aura should be turned on at a given time. It's a shame.
I really want to recommend this game, but I found myself actually dreading the combat as I played through it, which shouldn't be happening. I can only hope for a sequel where these mistakes aren't made again, because there's a lot of potential and I know it could be SO much better.