izigame.me

I have very mixed feelings on this game.
The Pros:
-Great Artstyle. Environments are absolutely gorgeous to look at and everything is beautifully animated.
-Great Music. Beautiful and ambient while exploring, and fittingly epic when fighting the titular Jotuns.
-Fun boss fights (for the most part). With the exception of the annoying aspects of the final boss I think every encounter with the Jotun were fantastic. Jera is a great tutorial, fittingly easy as the starting boss but with some neat mechanics that made her stand out. Fe has an awesome design and some neat mechanics with the pillars in her arena and the adds she summons (which weren't actually that bad to deal with). Isa has a great design and I love the arena the fight is set in but unfortunately he was probably the least interesting. Hagalaz was fantastic and her mechanics combined with the arena I thought were executed brilliantly. Kaunan was easily the best fight in the game from his presentation to his visual design and moveset. If the rest of the bosses were to that same level of quality the game would be a solid recommend from me.
-The combat, while many other reviews have said feels clunky I actually think feels great and fits the tone of the game perfectly. You're a little person with a weapon bigger than you are fighting things that absolutely dwarf you in size and capability. You're barely faster than the Giants that you're fighting and I think that works to great effect for the game and makes encounters that might otherwise feel slow or boring a lot more intense.
Cons:
-While i think Thora's movement for the combat is perfectly fine, the levels are so open and barren that her slow speed makes it even more tedious to get through than it would be otherwise. The only sections outside the boss fight I remember liking were Hagalaz's little star puzzles and dodging Jormungandr on the way to Isa. The section in Yggdrasil, while it looked pretty, was OBSCENELY boring. At least an hour of my gameplay at the time of me writing this (currently stuck on the final boss) was spent in that stage and I hardly remember a thing about it. Same goes for most of the other stages that were primarily just walking around a pretty looking, albeit empty field.
-Maps are borderline useless. Navigation through the barren levels is rendered even more obnoxious by the severe lack of direction you're given. Short of finding the mostly meaningless health upgrades (everything will still kill you in 2-3 hits regardless) there isn't much incentive to explore, and most of the time i found myself just scrambling to the end once i finally figured out where I was so i could nab the rune then get out.
-Enemy variety is extremely limited. There are maybe 5 types of non-boss enemies in the game and exactly one of them is somewhat interesting to deal with. The dwarves on the way to Fe and during her boss fight have 1 attack and die in one hit. The fire monsters on the way to Kaunan, while interesting in theory aren't fun to fight either. They throw boulders at you that you can knock into the lava with your heavy attacks to form bridges to traverse the level. However if the rocks hit you, hit a wall, hit another rock or get hit by another rock as its being thrown, both break. They're also really difficult to aim properly and at least one in every 3 attempts will go flying off in the wrong direction which is severely annoying. The fire monsters themselves die with one heavy attack and their only attack is the boulder toss. The bird in Yggdrasil is just annoying and didn't add any depth to the boring area it was in. The draugr that you fight for the tutorial gets bigger as it takes more damage, which sounds cool until you find out it only has one attack (maybe 2 if you let it live long enough, which i didn't). Jormungandr on the way to Isa is cool visually and neither too difficult nor too easy to dodge, he was alright I like him.
-Odin's homing spear attack is absolutely obnoxious. There is no reason a tracking projectile needs to last that obscenely long and track you that obscenely hard. It isn't fun to deal with.
-Boss fights, which are great and easily the best part of the game, have made up maybe an hour of my total play time,
While the game has a fair share of flaws, I would say if it goes on sale it might be worth picking up if the boss fights seem appealing to you. If you're willing to bear with the long treks to those few golden moments, and are okay with the slow combat, you might have some fun here. If the idea of aimless wandering through giant levels turns you off, you probably won't like the game. I'm giving this thumbs up for Kaunan, he deserves it.