izigame.me

I quite like this game, as ive heard it described its Townscaper with lore and trade lines, and I say that description is apt. The game has a somewhat cool "Faction system" based around managing 4 factions, some of whom hate each-other, and their respective populations within your settlement/empire. There is also a "Combat" System in the game, wherein you get "Commanders" (Members of the factions within your empire, who can be attached to a "Command Tower" and grant you some combatants for your Escort) and then fly near to whatever the enemy is and watch as your escort shoot them, the only experience I personally have had with that was defending some of my supply lines, in those battles I never actually got to see the enemy, my escort just killed them before they even rendered in for me. There are also certain faction settlements within the world, that you can interact with, trade, declare war, ask them to join you (If you chose to side with their faction this run) and I believe I saw an option to create embassies, presumably for smoothing relations (My first play-through I accidentally sided with the Pirates, making the Imperium and the Mancers dislike me, and their populations within my city be angry.) despite the inability to actually make an embassy. There are a few things I personally dislike about this game, I will list them below so if you don't want to read this block of Text you can see just the gripes.
1. Marketed as "Procedural Generation": Or at least that was my understanding, and the structures within your city are procedural generated, which is very much an appeal of this game, the ability to make random, cool little cities, however the game takes place on 1 pre-generated over world map, with the only differences being where you'll find refugee centers (More on those later), and when you'll find certain faction characters that join your settlement, which are also all pre-determined, and I wish were procedurally generated.
2. The faction Limits: Near as I can tell the game will always hard limit you to 2 "Citadels" (Worker spawners) per faction, which I personally dislike, Each faction has a meter within your settlement that represents their population, and how much they dislike you, effectively their unrest. I personally would like the ability to do "X-Faction Purist" runs, where you only recruit from that particular faction, maybe you really like the look of their citadels/ command towers, maybe its just a challenge you want to do for yourself, but in the current state, you effectively cant do that, as you would be limited to effectively 16-18 workers for your entire settlement. Additionally the different factions have what Ill refer to as "Heroes" within, who are willing to join your faction as your population of their faction increases within your city, these include Captains (Both trade and warships for moving resources, and protecting the trade routes respectively), Commanders (Add to your entourage for combat, or can boost certain resource buildings), and for 3 of the factions, Leaders (Im not actually 100% sure what the leaders do, aside from make the other 3 factions hate you, to my understanding they are just super powerful commanders), additionally the free-Houses (The "Starting faction" and the one I personally like the Aesthetic of the most, has no leader, and only 2 commanders (That add entourage) and 2 warship captains, meaning they are always going to be out shined by the other 3 factions. The issue I take with this is two fold, 1. That makes a "Faction Purist run" as ive coined it, impossible, as you would only have access to like 8 or so heroes, and 2. there is very little variety in the heroes. I think an improvement to the system would be to make the Heroes Procedural generated as well, so that you could have a large amount of heroes for any given faction, with them being actually useful depending purely on chance. I also acknowledge that the 2 settlement limit per faction is probably a design choice (Its also entirely possible it isn't and 8 settlements just happens to be the max and my RNG made it be an even split, but I also personally dislike being limited to 8 worker spawners, I want to make a massive empire, and 8 citadels wouldn't really cut it.), I just personally dislike it and wish it was an option I could turn off.
3. Lack of Visual Variety: I quite like this game's visuals, I just wish that there was a bit more variety, when I first saw this game I thought there was going to be a lot more visual variety, for example, I thought every faction would have a different design for the Surveyor (The player Airship), which is not the case, I thought different faction houses would have different colored Roofs/flags attached to them so that you could get a visual overview outside of the menu of how much of any given faction lives in your city (I'm not saying to actually make it that mechanically deep, I just think different colored roofs would be nice for some variety from that nice teal/green color) I thought that different factions would have different tower designs (They don't).
Right now I would give this game a 9/10, if The Developer adds like a hero pack, or something of the like (Not wholly out of the question, He added a day 1 DLC for a free Imperium Warship to guard your docks, wouldn't surprise me if he added more) I would give it a solid 10/10
Im aware that like 90% of this review is criticism, and ive only played like 3 hours at this point, but I do genuinely quite enjoy the game, intend to continue playing it for a long time, and hope to see it continue to be supported, agian, hopefully with like a Free-House Leader at some point.