izigame.me

The game is actually kinda enjoyable for the dozen or so hours (the playtime info is incorrect due to a bug I'll mention below) I have played WHEN it actually worked, but I can't recommend it due to many nasty bugs and the overall unpolished state it is currently in.
Note that I mainly played solo, co-op gameplay is more fun but it's hard to complete a co-op session due to constant network disconnects.
The Good: Nice art-style, great cheesy 80's cartoon feel, and the combat is mostly fun, especially if you get to play co-op with friends.
The Not-so-Good/Bad: While the characters and objects have nice cartoon-ish look, the level map structures have some cheaper 3D-ish look, so the whole thing doesn't really have much cartoon feel during the gameplay itself (I think maybe it will feel more cartoon if there can be a third person perspective mode? since the characters look clearly more cartoon-ish). Actually the levels feel unpolished in general, there are invisible map barriers where arrows just stuck in mid-air, steps leading to straight stone walls (not collapsed stones), and minor glitches where rooms are filled with some kind of dirt pile but you can "clip through" and open chests sitting "inside" the dirt pile. Also your character can "clip through" the level transition barrier "halfway" and shoot enemies with ranged attack without entering the level.
Also it's hard to call the levels procedural generated, as there are maybe half a dozen or so level maps for each chapter with mostly the same loot/object and enemy placements, so each level is randomly chosen as one of those available maps with very limited randomization of shrines and entry/exit points. Considering each run has more than 15 levels, it's inevitable to encounter quite some level map repetition in a run.
And the random skills/perks and items you can picked up in a run can feel quite unbalanced at times, a lot are clearly useless while a few are extremely powerful. The traps and stuff are also more annoying than fun most of the time. Overall level design and skill/perk/item systems feel unpolished.
The Ugly: somehow the game requires Epic Games client to play, which in itself is nothing unbearable for me (but it may drive off some others), however I believe this Epic Games client may be tied to some of the worse bugs the game currently has. First, at times the game status keeps showing "running" after exiting, that's why I have 50+ hours playtime shown here, sometimes I played for an hour and exited, and the game time just kept adding for hours as it's still "running" for steam, and I cannot start another game session without a system restart as it's never really exited. I found out that force killing some background Epic Games processes in Windows Task Manager can end the "running" status, but not sure if it would have some side-effects for new game sessions or not.
The network connection is extremely unstable, not sure if it has something to do with the Epic Games client or not, but it keeps disconnecting and going "play offline" at times. Also it seems it will keep switching between "offline" and "online" mode automatically, which leads to another bug: when you are picking a perk/skill and getting a "network disconnected" message, it means you have automatically picked the "dismiss" option, AND it will automatically pick the "dismiss" option for the ENTIRE RUN afterwards. That means once you get a "network disconnected" while picking a skill/perk, you cannot get any new skills/perks/ability upgrades from shrines or shops, and when you try to buy a skill/perk/ability upgrade from a shop, you spend the gold but get nothing! I think maybe it'd be better to have a "permanent" offline mode option where there would be no more "network disconnected" popup, currently even when you chose to "play offline" it will keep switching online/offline in the background somehow, with the untimely popups ruining the run.
And there are complete control freeze at times, which is happening a lot since I'm in chapter 2, so much so that I have not been able to finish episode 5 due to this nasty bug, as some levels into the run all controls would be suddenly lost at some random point, the character would stand still with animations still playing, but no keyboard or controller input would work, so the game still plays on with the character standing still, and there's no way to proceed or even exit the game except a force kill.
The Weird: this is about parts/designs of the game that's neither good nor bad, but just feel strange. first the character level progression is completely fixed, meaning you will be at a certain fixed character level at a certain map in a certain episode. So you will start episode 1 at level 1, episode 2 at level 4, episode 3 at level 7, and then back to level 1 at episode 4 (as you are entering a new chapter). It's okay for a roguelite game, but still strange.
And the game shares the same resource (gold) for shopping items in the run and upgrading the character outside the run, so you spend less in a run, you get more points to upgrade for future runs. This is kinda strange as it makes less incentive to spend gold in a run (at least before maxing out character upgrades), thus leading to a potentially less varied and less fun game run. Other roguelite games I have played mostly have different resources for in-run purchases and out-run upgrades, so you don't have your hands tied when purchasing items/upgrades during a run.
Lastly the constellation system, not sure if it's because I'm still not grasping the whole system or not, but since it's "constellation" where there are "lines" connecting the "slots", I kinda expected when you place certain same-type or different-type gems in "connected" slots, there would be some extra effects, but so far it seems there no such effects? Which makes the whole "constellation" thing feel strange as it just functions the same as separate gem slots with a bundle of lines not having any meaning?
All in all, I think this is a nice and fun game, and I'd recommend it despite its unpolished state and some weirdness in its designs, but right now given the nasty bugs (which may or may not be related to the required Epic Games services running in the background), I cannot recommend this game until the devs can get all those game-stopper bugs fixed up.