izigame.me

I want to preface this by stating that this is a must-have for anyone playing the game. The ability to taxiderm your hunts and show them to your friends is simply essential. However, there are a few minor issues that added together made me more irritated at them than excited to have this feature.
- First off, the lodge is designed in an extremely specific way and you have no ability to change it. Obviously you can choose what animals go one what preset areas, but you have no choice deciding what those areas are. For example, there are plaques on the wall and on tables that can only fit extra small animals like fowl and rabbits. If you don't happen to hunt those animals or care about mounting them, it means that an entire area of usable space is now taken up by slots you aren't interested in. I tend to hunt the big game, and it's pretty irritating that floor space that could easily fit a large stand is taking up by a rabbit stand or a goose stand, or enough wall space for several large animals is dedicated to small ones. I feel like this could be easily fixed by adding in an option to swap what is in that area. For example, on the ground just as some platforms can be rotated, have an option to swap them out to larger/smaller ones depending on if there is enough space. The same goes for the ones on the walls.
- The game is EXTREMELY picky about what animals can go where. For example, the small platform can fit a warthog or a musk deer, but not a springbok or any other small antelopes, despite the fact that they seem to be the perfect size for them. Wildebeest only fit on large platforms and plaques, despite the fact that they seem like they would fit on the mediums. While you can put a smaller animal like a rabbit on a much bigger sized platform, you cannot put a big animal on a little one. While that tends to make sense (a buffalo cannot sit on a coffee table), there were countless times where I wanted a certain animal on a certain platform and the game wouldn't allow it for seemingly no reason. I think a more 'loose' placement of animals on plaques/platforms would be greatly appreciated and would give a lot more creativity and freedom to how you design the lodge.
- The Shoulder mounts....aren't shoulder mounts. For those who are not familiar with hunting, when you are taxiderming an animal to go on the wall, you mount it from the very start of the shoulders forwards. In game however, they start at the neck or even at the back of the head forwards. As a result, a lot of the animals look really weird when you put them on the wall mounts. The cattle and larger antelope in particular look really goofy when it's just a head resting on a gigantic plaque with tons of unused space. I feel like a change here would probably be easier than the other suggestions and also more immediately needed, since there are so few spots to put large animals on the ground and it looks so goofy to put them on the wall.
- Following the previous, there simply aren't enough spaces to put big animals on the ground, especially because of what might be the biggest problem with the lodge. It is very 'specifically' designed. There are several predetermined rooms with their own names and functions (Bedroom, Dining Room, etc) which again reduces not only creativity but more importantly space. It was quite frustrating to not have the space to put an animal you want in your hunting lodge because there is so much furniture everywhere. Again, I wish there could be an option to replace furniture with a stand (or multiple smaller stands) for animals.
Lastly, while this isn't the most important thing, I can't help but feel this should have been free with the game. Charging people extra for what seems like a standard game-play feature just doesn't feel right. I don't mind too much because this really was an exciting feature but all these other qualms together add up to it feeling really disapointing.
If all the above mentioned things were changed (Or even just one or two) I would probably change my review to positive but I worry that they won't be taking suggestions/criticisms since it seems to be a specific manor; they strongly imply that there will be other lodges in the future.
From that regard, I do have a suggestion for the future to make this more enjoyable; In the future make a sort of 'blank canvas' hunting lodge, which could start out with a single room and you could pay in-game cash to expand it, choosing the size of a connecting room, and then individually choosing what you want in that room. So you could make a new empty room, and in preset 'grids' place the specific platforms you want, so you could have a room filled with large stands, or mix and matched, or etc. I get the idea of having a neatly designed 'set peice' lodge, but since it seems to have come at the expense of the actual feature of taxiderming your hunts I would rather have had larger, 'blank' rooms to design as the player sees fits.