izigame.me

I came in not expecting much, and did find not much.
Graphically, it's honestly decent. I'm not familiar with the Unreal asset store to say if this is an asset flip, but even if it was, I did not see any two assets that didn't go together, so at least props for that.
The city is quite big and even if the view distance isn't huge even on max settings, it felt immersive enough.
I did not have any performance issues, the game was running at 120+ fps on a 3080 with max settings.
The story starts like the generic zombie game story, no idea if it evolves into something but it was neither bad or good, there's voice acting with some facial animations, the npcs have some dialog options to learn more about the world or story and can give you small tips, nothing much but it did help giving some sense of coherence to the world.
But well, that was the best I had to say about this game... It's all downhill from there.
First the gameplay, while it technically functions, it's really lacking in the enjoyment part. The movement is as basic as it gets, you can run but you'll get stuck on any small ledge, you can jump but you need stamina for that, of course. Not sure if it consumed stamina, but when I was out, no jumping for me.
Then there's the lack of melee, a lot of people are complaining, and rightfully so, if you ever run out of ammo or find yourself with no equipment whatsoever for some reason (foreshadowing), then you're as good as dead : you cannot outrun zombies nor fight back, you might get lucky and get them stuck on some decor piece, but you'll eventually run out of stamina and get hit at least once, which inflicts bleeding, slowly killing you.
And then there's the world itself, it is pretty sure, but gosh is it empty. All throughout the 40 minutes I managed to spend actually playing, I saw a grand total of... *drum roll* 11 zombies ! Woohoo ! And I went inside buildings to loot, firing my gun left and right in the streets, occasionally finding a couple zombies.
During this entire time, I was hearing gun shots constantly from other players, I do not know how large the range is, but I never managed to find any player. I ran, and ran, and ran, stopped to regen stamina on some slightly elevated decor which zombies don't know how to climb, and then resumed running.
I did loot some stuff on my way, but let's talk about that : a select few random assets you'll come by will have an interaction prompt to open them. I could not find any common pattern between them, sometimes an asset could be looted, sometimes not, sometimes you had a pile of 20+ crates and not a single one could be opened, sometimes there's an icecream cart with ammo inside. It's impossible to tell beforehand if it'll be lootable, and you'll only know once you're up against the thing you're trying to loot. All that for a handful of random items that didn't seem to have any relation to what you were looting, so no strategy as to where to go or what to prioritize, making it a fairly bad looting experience.
The gunplay wasn't too bad but it also wasn't particularly impressive, the only issue I had with it was from the lag.
Oh yeah, I did not mention it yet, but joining a server is hardcore. I could not manage to join any in Europe, nor North America, but did eventually manage to join Asian ones.
I'm saying eventually because that's what the 30 other minutes of play time are, selecting a character, waiting 10s for the server list to refresh, scrolling alllll the way to the bottom to find a server that wasn't full, selecting join and waiting 10s, being booted back to the main menu with an error message, and repeat. Again. And again. Each time taking me about 15 minutes to manage to join a server.
So of course playing on a server in a different region isn't great, the lag ranged from actually not bad to about 1s delay on everything. Wouldn't be as much of an issue with a joining queue or more servers in my region, but alas the team seemed unprepared for accomodating many players, ironic for an MMO.
Also "MMO", as I mentionned, I haven't seen a single player outside of the hub area, a few friends I was playing with did see some apparently, but after some research it appears that you can at max play with 32 other players in the same instance. To put it in perspective PUBG isn't considered an MMO and you can fight against 100 players in a single match.
While on the subject ; the open world portion is as much open world as an extraction shooter goes. There are a handufl of random buildings you can enter, the map seems fairly large though I feel like you could explore most of it in under 30 hours of playtime.
Did I say I was playing with friends ? Sorry, I meant to say all 4 of us bought the game but played each on our own because no matter how much we tried, joining the same server was impossible. The others played for a couple hours more than I did, and not once did we manage to have two people in the same server.
Quite the epic experience for a multiplayer game.
Let's not forgot to mention that the game is quite unstable, on average you should expect a crash every hour or so, or even faster sometimes. And everytime it does it's back to joining hell of course.
Oh but that's not the worst part, when you disconnect, your avatar stays there for 60s before you're actually logged out.
Do you care to guess what can happen during those 60 seconds in game where you loose all your stuff upon dying ? That's right, if there was a zombie or another palyer nearby, you'll die. And lose everything in your inventory.
Well, if it's a zombie, it should all be on the ground for you to loot, that is if you manage to join the same server again haha, good luck with that, I couldn't manage that.
So yeah, I ran, saw nothing, ran, looted a bunch of random stuff, ran, finally found a building I could go in that looked kinda interesting, crashed 5 minutes after, joined back and was in the middle of the city with nothing, no ammo, no armor, no weapons, no bandages, no food, just the 500 coins you get after dying.
So I ran towards the nearest exit point, came across one zombie, ran, eventually got caught up and took a hit, started bleeding, ran, regen stamina, ran, found another zombie, ran, and died of bleeding not even halfway to the exit point.
There are vehicles in the game supposedly, but the cheapest you can buy costs 1,100,000 credits. To ground that number, the most expensive weapons cost in the thousands, up to like 20 thousands or so. And those will already take you multiple trips to buy. So I hope you have freed up your schedule over the next couples months if you want one. No Idea if you can steal them from other players, or if there are any lying out in the open, but I could not interact with any of the vehicles I came across.
I tried looking into all the shops to see where the game could go, but as far as I could tell, there really isn't much beyond a bunch of weapons, a few attachments, some armor and backpacks.
I don't know where they plan on taking the game, but at least for now there doesn't seem to be much to progress towards, again don't know if the story is any better than the typical MMO fetch quest excuses of a story.
In conclusion, whether it's for the lack of gameplay, lack of content, server issues, or expectations towards the promised experience, I'd urge you to stay away from this, at least for now.
The game didn't feel like a scam to me, there clearly was effort put into it, maybe not 5 years though but it still felt like an alpha of an actual game.
At least if the game was $10 or so, maybe I would've kept it and tried it again every once in a while when an update seems to bring something interesting. But $40 ?!! For this lackluster shell ?! Yeah no...
Come back in another 5 years and maybe it'll be interesting then.