izigame.me

UPDATED:
As of this update, it's safe to say that even if this game was fully optimized, it's not worth more than a deep sale. I'm a long time Dead space fan so this is a massive disappointment in all areas. This review will have spoilers.
-The gameplay is stale, combat is a muddled mess of having all of your evasion and defensive skills being tied to movement keys instead of separate commands. So if you ever find yourself in a room with environment hazards, there's definitely the chance you'll end up blocking an attack instead of back tracking, or dodging into a hazard and dying. Everything feels adequately weak despite being updated. The optimization just makes this worse, frame drops leads to dropping inputs, leads to inevitably getting 2-3 shot on any difficulty mode because the game didn't register your dodge; despite only needing to hold the button to activate.
-The difficulty settings may as well not exist, normal enemies 3 shot you on easy/medium, 2 shot you on hard. I couldn't notice a massive difference between easy/medium/hard and spent about an hour in each mode. Just overall weird feeling.
-Combat encounters are less than one dimensional. Wanna know how to kill everyone enemy in the game? Dodge and swing, shoot after a combo. No variation to any enemy. All the same, just different flavours of how long it takes to kill them. No need to strategize either, enemies avoid fighting to more than one at a time so you can just back pedal to a wall in a horde of enemies and fightclub everything mostly 1:1, even on hard. Atleast dead space had enemies with armour on some limbs so you had to shoot other areas to efficiently kill them. Weapon upgrades just expedite the process as you'd imagine, and while fun when you first unlock them it soon becomes apparent just how tedious and boring the combat really is. For a game that advertised a deep strategic combat system to master, it's hilarious that the opposite is the truth.
-Blocking. Why block for reduced damage when you can just dodge for no damage? Literally useless and pointless.
-Currency acquisition and inventory management are a fucking joke. I've spent half the game with 6 inventory slots and the standard prison uniform. Upgrading weapons is so expensive its unfit. Most enemies give 5-20 credits, big enemies give 80-100. Maxing one of THREE upgrade paths on your baton OR GRP costs 300 + 900 + 2700 total. 11,700 credits to max each in it's entirety.
This leads into one major problem with economy, and one major problem with game design.
Economy: Most of your raw credits will come from item pick ups that you sell, but you're also limited to 6 inventory slots for a near majority of the game. Which makes resource management a pain in the ass more than anything else. "But Sychar, resource management is part of the game, it's survival horror!". Yes and no. Even on hard the game gives you enough pick ups to paint the inside of the space station with bullets and leave you enough to finish the game, health kits are found like candy. All this makes you do it backtrack to markets 2-3 times before you can progress to sell everything but also keep your inventory full with health and ammo.
Game Design: The credits from enemy drops are in short supply, but to combat this; enemies are not. After the first 2-3 hours this game turns into Dead Space 3. It's an action game with zero tension. It's combat encounter after combat encounter, jump scares that are not earned, and the most predictable encounters you could ever fathom. The scariest parts in the game were in the 3 launch trailers. This just gets even worse late game, when it literally just turns into an action movie with no breaks. Followed by back to back to back boss fights.
The supporting cast: About halfway through the game and Karen Fukuhara has had less screen time in game than she has in the trailers. Elias while endearing, does fuck all. He's Kendra and Hammonds little brother who's even less useful than I make him sound.
No soul: Using B list actors to try and carry the weakest story telling ever conceived really just sucks the very *very* little soul out the this game that remained. Jacob is the most boring protagonist I've ever played as, and I've played bad rats. His entire delivery of the role falls flat on its ass at every turn.
Mysteries?: I pose this as a question, because are they really a mystery? When Glen Schofield says he took inspiration from his other works, he means it. You can tell where this story is going within the first 10 minutes, and you'll guess it almost completely. They threw dead space 1, 2, 3 in a furnace, melted it into a shit ingot, took it out, beat it to death with a shit hammer. Boom, callisto protocols story. Ooooo a main villain who's a weird fanatic and wants to welcome the new transformation as some religious enlightenment. Where have we seen this before.
The environments: About halfway through the game and everything has been mostly the same. Some interesting environments, like the cell block in the very beginning, and the habitat dome. But then you get to the habitat dome. A big suspending platformed area surrounded with low poly, low texture trees that look like they're straight out of a ps2 game. Fucking shameful.
UI/UX: Fucking nightmare from start to finish, if you're using anything but the highest AA settings the menus and HUD are unreadable. You can't access graphic options in game, only at the main menu. Makes it so you need a decent checkpoint just to troubleshoot settings to make the game bearable. You can't listen to audio logs outside of the menu. How the fuck is it 2022 and we're walking back on QOL features the original dead space had? This entire game is a testament to the buffoonery in the gaming industry right now.
No breadcrumbs: Whilst not a problem in itself, you also have no way to even know what your objective is after the first flash of the quest update. It's up to the player to wander in the right direction if you happen to be in a combat situation during dialogue and miss exposition. Not that that's hard, the game is linear to a fault, with some sparse seemingly long side areas with minor loot. But most paths that would be deemed as "correct" to progress the story, have hard limits with no back tracking. Want to explore a side area but gamble on the wrong turn and now you've progressed the main story? Too fucking bad, you fucked up the 50/50 and there's no turning back. This is why a lack of breadcrumbs hurts the game. With no penultimate sense of "where" the player is bound to miss out on side areas due to both a combination of forced progression, and no clear way to find out your current goal if you missed the prompt. Players being punished due to no fault of their own is bad design.

I'm halfway through the game and feel like I've made ZERO progress towards anything significant, whether that's to the story, the plot, the unanswered questions, or my character and gear progression.
During the entirety of the time I played, there was one repeating thought the entire time, it was this: "I can't wait for this to be over so I don't have to play it anymore". At this moment, I knew the game wasn't worth my time. It's a 10 hour long game with no replay-ability. If I'm paying some $13CAD per hour of gameplay, this shit better be incredible. Because I've paid much less for MUCH MUCH more, in the case of games like Elden ring, god of war, even the first fucking dead space game.
This is a sad excuse for a game, let alone a game that's $115CAD after taxes. Everyone associated with the design choices and story telling in this game needs a hard reset, and should never work in the industry again. And vice versa, anyone who's content with this quality of product, even ignoring optimization; may very well be the living definition of mediocrity.
The scariest thing about this game is the waste potential.