izigame.me

Unlike most negative reviews, I have played through and beat the game (on Mythic / Hard (3rd out of 4 difficulties)).
I think I can recommend it for avid lovers of Minecraft, but not for anyone who enjoys a good RTS. If you've never played an RTS, this is a very watered down version of that, if you end up not liking the game, I would not take that to mean you don't like RTS's.
For Minecraft fans, it has a lot of new unique characters and mobs as well as a ton of Piglin variants. It also has a really cool bit of lore about the origin of a certain mob that I won't spoil. A lot of the systems are very in-line with Minecraft themeing, such as using Allays to gather resources, the way buildings pop up block by block, the concept of the enemy base being a nether portal, etc. It is beautifully designed and themed.
For RTS fans, I'm sorry to say that this game falls short in a lot of regards. It tried to be an action RTS where you are the leader and charge into battle too, but this is its biggest flaw. It doesn't feel like you are leading, especially later in the game, are often the weakest link in your army. On top of that, controlling your forces is unintuitive, and you can't control them from afar? You have to be right next to your army to command them, combining that with a really small army of 20 to start, you often find yourself charging the enemy base, attacking until most die, running outside the base to get reinforcements, and repeat for 30+ mins per base (that there's at least 12+ of). There is only a handful of troops to pick from and some are just straight up better versions of others. The enemy piglins don't play like a traditional RTS opponent either, they have a variety of enemies, but they are not manged, so you'll just face a random array of enemies constantly coming at you. Because it's somewhat random, the forces you control usually end up being a generic jack of all trades assortment that never changes. On top of all of that, there is no automatic reinforcements or resource gathering, so if you run out of resources you'll have to travel to a zone to collect them (assuming your villages don't have any in their chest), and if your troops die in battle you'll have to run and go make more. There is no eb and flow like you feel from most RTS's. At least on Mythic, the enemies felt unforgivably tough. My bases stopped using walls entirely and I started making walls out of offensive buildings. Crude, but it worked. And my attack strategy boiled down into cheese strategies. Use one type of troop, run past all of the buildings and enemies straight to the portal (enemy base), and destroy it without actually taking on the base. Or, when that wasn't feasible, use a long range TNT cannon to snipe the portal from afar, without ever going inside the base. Due to the lack of commanding, the lack of troop design, the lack of proper enemy AI, there was very little strategy in a strategy game.
You can tell there was a lot of love poured into this game, so it is unfortunate that it was mired with bad design decisions. The game became tedious and stale after a while, maybe not even the 10 hour mark, so I cannot recommend this game. If it's on sale, maybe, but it would have to be almost 75% off ($10) to be worth it to check out and see if you enjoy it.

Some good ideas surrounded by a lot of badly done ones. Having to balance resources between defenses and troops is a great little thing. But then the finer details of trying to build an efficient defense is undermined by janky placement controls, and having camera locked to where your mouse cursor is at during build mode. You can't delete multiple buildings at the same time, there isnt a way to select multiple structures to delete them. You must individually delete structures that you built. This includes walls.
What makes this worse is that walls are easily built. But then, each plank of the wall must be deleted individually. Not only that, you must approach the particular offending plank, and press and hold a delete button to remove the singular structure you want to remove.
If you had to build some hastily made defense, fixing it up for the next potential attack is going to be a real pain. The game wants you to be efficient, but then lacks the finer controls to help you along in being more efficient. Its a real shame, because it can be really fun at times.
For 40 dollars? Nope. Come back when its cheaper. Or even better, find a better game.
For everyone else still playing, its a frustrating experience of always wishing it was better.

The game was abandoned after launch. I thought the game had an odd long tutorial but... Turns out that's just how the whole game is apparently. The game is truly very visually appealing, but there's a lot of issues with the game that do add up to a bad experience:
- The game seems to be made to be played with a controller and as such as very odd keyboard and mouse controls that aren't common on a PC game but typical of consoles games.
- The game relies a lot on having an army of allies for combat, but their AI is incredibly stupid and doesn't do the most basic thing you could probably even imagine it could do. Many times i had to "capture" them to select and send them again against a certain direction or else they wouldn't attack after going forward.
- The game will require you to make bridges and stairs and it fails at that. Most of the times the game won't understand where you want to put your stairs and will simply say you can't build it that big or high, and, if because the game doesn't pause when construction, you might face quite some damage while trying to make your stairs happen. If this wasn't enough, enemies can pull you out of position, ruining entirely the very precise and careful attempt at placing stairs. Awful.
- The main character is mostly useless. The game seems to be strategy oriented, so why the controls for the main character seem to divert from that? If damage needs to be done by the main character it's necessary to spam buttons, and i assure you there's not a single indicator of damage or HP on enemy structures. The main character is also very fragile and consequences are severe if you die in battle, unlike the allies that are expendable and renewable.
I bought this on launch because i thought this would be incredible with all those trailers and announcements made at big events and conferences but it ended up being a big disappointment. Unfortunately, I had played this game for over 2 hours when i decided it was not good enough. This game is one of the worst i've ever played.