izigame.me

I finally got every achievement in this game. For a while it was a go-to, and then more recently it has been a game I could play while my cat slept on my mouse hand (which he frequently does).
I've enjoyed playing this game during its early access development, but there are things I don't like about it as well. Many of the upgrades are limited to certain rarities being available (common thru rare, no epic or legendary), or have some hard cap to how many of them you can find in a run. This makes the game feel like the developer is trying to 'win' against the player by nerfing good builds and limiting pure RNG to cap player scaling against enemy scaling. Over the course of the game's development, it seems that any good build players find and share with each other, the components of that meta build get reworked or nerfed. When a part of a game that I enjoyed gets taken away or changed for something worse it affects my opinion of the game as a whole, an example being how thunder type abilities used to stack crit chance debuffs on enemies, and that could synergyze with runes and level upgrades to scale in an amazing way, stacking growing multipliers over the course of the run to multi-crit (to apply your crit damage multiplier multiple times over). With the current patch, electric abilities will stack up to 20, then do flat damage, removing the stacks of electrified. There is no run potential with electric now, and the thrust abilities that give form (a player buff that stacks crit chance) or the abilities that apply the dazed debuff (what electrified used to be) to enemies are garbage, and no build I got together around those buffs/debuffs has felt good. At one point IIRC meteor was one of the strongest fire spells, now it's one of the weakest. Surprise gift the seasonal ability was one of the strongest a couple major patches ago, now I avoid it.
in the current version of the game there are around 5 builds that I could get together in spite of so many different characters and abilities being in the game: fire abilities with a detonator (consumes all stacks of burn for % of total damage immediately, scales with ability level, namely flaming swords), poison with detonator, doom with detonator, arcane, and lastly bomb abilites, just because it's some of the characters' best option with their ability pool. Oh, and chaos with a disarray focus. I tried builds using thrust/slash/slam/projectile etc but they struggled against bosses, making the game feel boring and frustrating.
The experience you earn in a run doesn't really depend on killing bosses, so you can bulwark it up and spend 30 minutes working through overlord 1 or endless 1 and get as many character levels as if you'd been advancing thru portals every 8 minutes. IMO that's not great.
The game's still in early access for now, and I enjoyed getting at least 5 of the characters to lvl 170. I wish more possibilities were available to the player in the form of viable builds. The character I saved for last was the summon-based beastmaster, but summon abilities from either nature or shadow left any finished build I got together feeling dissapointing, which wasn't the note I had hoped to end on. I thought summons would be my favorite and that I'd be finishing on a high note. Oh well.
When another character releases or a new map drops, or whatever content is next, I'm sure I'll stop back by this game and play it again. my cat is on my mousepad as I type this :3