izigame.me

Review from the viewpoint of a solo player on default settings. Have not fully completed the game; unlocked 3rd tier research and have started exploring final two areas of the map.
A nice switchup to the survival/crafting genre with some polish, but not without some flaws that drag it down. Excellent gameplay control for fighting and exploration, though basebuilding feels subpar. Would honestly give this game a neutral rating, rather than a thumbs down.
On default settings PvE Solo becomes an increasingly imbalanced timesink the further into the game you go, with design choices that seem intended for multiplayer both in fights and in resource gathering; this ends up shoehorning the player into specific playstyles to make up for it, and progression slows to a crawl as you spend an increasing amount of time carting basic materials around all across the map.
I believe certain problems can be alleviated through changing server settings, such as allowing resources to be teleported, increasing drop rates from enemies, lowering the time/resource costs of crafting, etc. But there are still some issues despite that.
Early game is excellent. Progression feels well paced and meaningful, and most of the required resources from upgrades are naturally collected from following the suggested order of the bosses. Bosses themselves are a nice challenge, not too difficult but still feel like they could crush you if you're careless. Pretty much all the weapons and abilities feel varied and viable at this point, and the game does a great job of teasing future potential when you randomly run into bosses on the field that are *far* outside your power level.
Early-Mid game, around the time you unlock castle walls, the cracks in the game start showing up, but it's not too bad yet. Some oddities in pacing start to rear their head, where you'll start to notice an imbalance in resource gathering. You'll have stacks and stacks of certain things, like flowers, plant fiber, wood pulp, leather, and blood essence, with next to nothing to use them on (for now), cluttering up your base with a mess of storage chests. But other resources you'll always be low on; lumber is used in just about everything, with stone blocks right behind. Crafting recipes are now starting to require a larger variety of base resources like sulphur, grave dust, and copper, and so begins your 'resource runs' where you'll spend hours collecting rocks, logs, ore and bones. It's around this time as well that RNG is introduced where crafting recipes are locked behind rare drops, or by 'spending' paper to unlock a random recipe.
Mid-game, as you start collecting quartz and iron, the flaws start increasing to a more noticeable degree. New weapons are introduced, with the scythe being a significantly better option than most of your other weapons. Bosses are now using more frustrating mechanics; summoning tanky/annoying mobs, chaining abilities together that can sometimes be impossible to dodge because of the cooldown of your dash, using debuff abilities that open you up to getting combo'd into massive amounts of damage, or using heals on themselves/the mobs; sometimes doing all of the above. This basically requires you to use at least one shield-type ability in your slot for nearly every major fight. Resource gathering becomes even heavier, with a greater variety of mats and several tiers of mats making limited inventory space an issue while exploring. Refining mats take longer too, making it far more time consuming to make your equipment, and every visit back to your base turns into a refinement and organization chore as you dump all your low tier mats into structures, in different rooms, to turn them into higher tier mats.
Speaking of the castle, it's around this point that you'll be expanding your base and hitting issues and quirks. Floors are finicky and can't be directly dismantled; they can only be replaced with another tile, with the basic ground tile being the only tile that can be 'deleted.' This makes it tremendously annoying and expensive to rearrange the floor plan as you get access to new facilities, as you'll want to replace the floors to get the discount refinement bonuses, which the resource costs quickly add up. This cost basically ruins the desire to do any sort of decoration or aesthetically pleasing designs until the very, very end game, as any rearrangement is going to significantly cost you. (EDIT: The Devs fixed this, apparently it was a bug involving walls and pillars. This should make castle rearrangement significantly easier.) The castle is also only limited to a single floor; you can't make a multi-story castle or towers or anything like that. The game limits your base size too, forcing you to make do with a smaller area (makes sense for multiplayer, not much for single).
Castle servants are also next to useless; they're clearly meant for resource gathering and defense, but nothing attacks you in single player inside your castle, and the clocks for sending out your servants are ridiculous; 12 real time hours for them to bring back a single stack of bones? Clearly a design choice for a multiplayer server, not for the single player experience. (EDIT: I've been told a few times that I'm wrong on this. My specific experience was sending out an 86% blood quality hunter to a graveyard area in the early game. The fastest timer I could give him while still getting a 100% success rate was 12 real time hours. When that finished, he came back with about 450 bones, 8 grave dust, 17 mourning lilies, and a single crafting book, which I'm still of the stance is not worth it. However, I have not tested the servants in the later areas; if you can truly get the timer down to about 2-3 hours and bring back large stacks of T2 and T3 mats back then I could possibly see it as being worth it.)
These issues only got worse as I entered into the late game. Gameplay is at its weakest here when dealing with large groups of enemies, and that's what the final areas have in droves. Some mobs now have boss-like characteristics where they can close distances and fight in such a way that you're guaranteed to take damage if you solely rely on your dash. Others have such high volume of enemies that you basically just have to constantly circle kite. Everything is tankier, and the use of ultimate abilities sometimes feels like you're simply tickling a lot of enemies.
Late game recipes require even more work with mats as well; either you grind the highest tiers by raiding villages/locations for hours, or you travel across the whole map to gather basic tier one mats, to convert to tier two mats, to then convert to tier three. The RNG recipes are even more numerous and expensive to gather, and it's almost a requirement to gather the upgraded armor sets from these random drops before you can progress, essentially turning the late game into a massive grindfest.
The game is still pretty early in its life, so will likely continue to change, perhaps even fixing or rebalancing some of these issues. It might be that the wall I hit in early late game is just a cruddy spot and that the true end game might have some greater enjoyment in it. Multiplayer might be a far better experience, especially with the way some abilities are clearly meant for support or disruption for other players to take advantage of.
What I *do* know, is that there are better single player survival-crafting game experiences out there at the moment.