izigame.me

This game is more mixed for me. I've 100% the game and built all the creature to satisfaction however bugs and lack of quality of life makes this game hard to recommend with certainty.
I love the art style and unique game play of summoning creature. Its more of a top down dungeon crawler but the gimmick is your creature is stand in for you ability.
Creature have their own health and you need to manager theirs and yours. Later you can customize creature ability with synergy and these can be quite game changing. Synergy can add new effect or enhance existing abilities. But it requires a creature of the synergy type to be in your party. However synergy cost essence and it can not be refunded. Resetting the synergy destroy the applies essence. This makes the game very unfriendly to experimentation as essence is quite time consuming to farm.
The game is consist of procedural generated map layout with hand made area. Each map will contain various resources and consumable. Later you gain access to expedition that is up to 3 maps of different type of biome that only count for one day. Expedition are preferable for its vast amount of resources, upgrades and bless.
The capture mechanic can be quite fiddly, you need to stand within a cone that swivel and rotate. Thankfully there are trinket and creature ability that makes it easier and manageable. Tougher and late game creature needs their health managed and carefully timed ability for successful capture.
Mid to late game you have access to hunts that let you pick specific bless and super blessed. Super bless creature are important as they always give max out traits. However expect to reroll several super bless as traits given are randomised, you get to pick between two trait for each of the 4 trait slots for some control, however there more than 8 traits and you may not see the trait slot you want in the trait selection pool for that creature.
Creature capture are limited by 3 Gatedrik particle. By mid to late game you will hate this limit. Early game it made sense as you had to make some sensible decision. But by mid to late game when bless and super bless consume 2-3 Gatedrik particle it will feel very limiting. The maximum amount of Gatedrik particle can not be upgraded. Often you will end up having to kill super bless you wanted to keep because of this as multiple can show up in expedition.
Hunts consume resource intensive essence, product of capturing creature. Failing hunt hard earned essence. Despite it showing 3 skull symbol for tries, it is only for death which is incredibly rare for you to die during hunts. Killing your target or letting the map that the target is on expires ends the hunt and you must start again. Because of the time and resource investment of hunts I recommend just save scumming and saving time especially since may want to reroll the creature and especially for super bless legendary that are quite expensive to hunt.
Your Main character have equip-able trinket that majority of effect is kind of underwhelming even when upgraded. Unfortunately the game felt you need limit the full amount of upgrades you can have despite being quite. This can be very disheartening if you farmed quite a bit for those trinket upgrade. Especially when the upgrades are miniscule, pushing only a few percent.
All consumable item are on a timer that tick down for each run, this is fine for health consumable. You can further extend consumable by cooking for them.
Unfortunately the time limit includes insects which is vital for cooking +6 traits. Insects is a nice way to compensate bad trait rolls, unfortunately its all up to luck. If you want certain skill you have to hope that 3 of the insect you want are available within 3 day, as all 3 must be cooked at once. This can be quite tedious. If the game had a fridge you could use to extend timer on a few consumable this would mitigate some frustration with luck base gathering.
Now for the biggest reason I wouldn't recommend the game. Its still buggy and its been almost about 10 month since last patch as of time of writing.
One of the most frequent bug is mounting one of your creature and ending up in inescapable area which can kill your run unless you have another mount charged, trinket that can regenerate creature ability or manage to kill every creature in the area.
Late game there are temple you can raid for gem for bonuses effect on trinket, limited by upgrade amount. About 1 in 15 runs the exit will not be interact-able and the run is killed. Especially frustrating if it happens at the end of expedition or ascension.
On rare occasion you can't back out of the menu and you have to force close, killing the run.
If you have to force close because of a bug, most of the time it will count it as death. This skips a day and forces you to spend another to retrieve your stuff.
One of the creature by name of Zoras is still bugged with circle of fire synergy. Does nothing, unless you fight an enemy Zhoras and it uses the circle of fire attack. Then your Zhoras fire of circle works.
Overall if you're looking to get invested in this game, expect some kinks and element of frustration.

Great idea with what feels like sloppy execution.

I made it most of the way through the game, keeping myself going on feeling like if I just stuck with it and I got powerful creatures, then maybe I'd enjoy it. The creatures themselves are very well designed and I think that really kept me on the hook, but it's just not really held up.

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Some gripes I've had with it:

1. Start with a fairly light one, translation/writing from a technical perspective. Has a decent amount of poor sentence structure and typos and not in a way that feels intentional for the tribal characters/setting.

2. Has a pretty significant pacing problem, on multiple fronts. The first and most glaring one is how tedious it is unlocking storage space for your creatures. It takes a rather notable amount of these shard items that you only get 1-2 of per map traversed. You also need these shards for other things, which doesn't feel as tedious (these upgrades are more powerful, so having to grind a bit doesn't feel too bad).

The second pacing issue is in some of the little mini-quests. For example, there's a common mission where you have to get 2 energy orbs from one spot to another. While doing so, enemies continuously spawn 1-2 at a time, and every time they get near the orb, it stops moving. These missions are not -difficult- in the slightest, just extremely tedious, forcing you to stop and fight easily dispatched enemies over and over at what feels like a snail-crawl pace, and you have to do it *twice* per mission. Another mission features just standing on buttons and waiting for them to charge.

3. Randomized nature of the trait system (effectively, your creature's skill tree) feels needless and annoying. Any one of them can get randomly assigned traits that are sometimes completely useless to the creature in question. Considering how luck-based acquiring your best creatures already is, it's annoying to have to go find another one when them popping up on the map at all is already a waiting game.

4. Balance issues. The combat feels like it distinctly favors certain types of creatures over others, favoring a hit-and-run strategy with speedy hard-hitters that you quickly recall after deploying. Healing is scarce enough that you really can't afford to let creatures stay out and take hits, and tanky creatures have virtually no way to sustain themselves unless they get lucky with the previously-mentioned very unreliable trait system.

In creature-collector games it's pretty normal to have some that are better than others, that's fine. But this is moreso an issue of "classes" feeling unbalanced. Tanks or otherwise slow hitters don't feel viable at all in my experience.

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What I liked:

1. The creature design. The vast majority of creatures in this game are very well designed imo. They have a decent variety to them but all of them have that "buddy" feel to some degree. From a gameplay perspective, they also do a decent job of making each of the creatures feel pretty distinct from each other.

2. Synergy system. A neat idea that I would've liked to see expanded on, you can effectively infuse the energy of some creatures into other creatures, and the infused creature will get bonuses if another creature that matches it's infused energy type in your party. Nice way to encourage seeking out a party that actually functions well with itself while giving the flexibility to make that happen outside their innate abilities.

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Overall, I wouldn't recommend it, but I'd maybe give another game by them a try in the future. This game had pretty strong "first project" vibes and maybe was just ambitious for the skill level of the developers.

I remember enjoying this game back in early access, but it seems like there was a major shift in design and this isn't a roguelike anymore. That's honestly disappointing, as I supported a roguelike and ended up getting a different product in the end.
The change in design made the game far worse imo. Before, this was a fun roguelike where you go through small levels, battling bosses. It actually posed a challenge. Now that I tried the full release, I've been playing 45 mins of fetch quests, and each run has only lasted below 10 mins. This made the game feel very linear and quite boring.
I'm not sure if the game lets you play longer once you finish the story, but I'm not enjoying the game enough to make it through to the end.
The game has a lot of designs made to waste your time:
Each area in the "dungeon" might as well just be a circle arena because it functions as one. An area is relatively big for only housing 3-5 enemies. You waste a lot of time walking to find enemies, and there's no other reason to explore. The game even knows this, as it encourages you to use the map to teleport to the next area instead of walking to it.
Item drops should be automatically collected rather than needing to be interacted with. There's no inventory management to consider, so having to walk and interact to collect drops is just another instance of the game wasting your time.
The new hub area is unnecessarily big. The game once again wastes your time walking to interact with each npc.
This was just a big disappointment, as the game really had a lot of potential back in EA. It felt akin to Gungeon but had unique combat gameplay. Now I'm honestly not sure what the game is even trying to be.