izigame.me

Top-tier rogue-lite, and maybe, just maybe there's something here for the shoot 'em up fans too, no promises. Veers too much into bullet vomit cluster-muck territory towards late game, and makes some design decisions I don't agree with (read: don't find fun) but the developers clearly have a strong vision for this one. It's just that they're trying to balance that vision against years of added content and mechanics. It doesn't always work.
I'm writing this review as someone who has been playing this game since the day the first DLC came out, when the game was still called "Monolith". The name change is a bit of a touchy subject maybe, and prevailing enough to warrant a mention in this review as well. It was done for SEO purposes and I wish the developers were a bit more upfront about that -- They instead said it had to do with Monolith Studios or whatever. I can now look back and retroactively point out that it wasn't a big deal after all, but it was a genuinely confusing period for a while. Moving on.
This is a top-down action rogue-lite with Zelda-styled square grid floors. Upgrades are paced between the floors, there are shops and special rooms where you can find weapons, weapon modifiers and just general upgrades to health and ammo capacity. Super basic action rogue-lite stuff with a "bullet hell" twist that primarily only shows its teeth during the bosses. There are lots of bosses. Like, a ton of bosses.
Speaking of, the bosses are alright. Some are very cool, some are kinda just annoying. I love Smooth Machine. You'll know when you get there. It utilizes the strengths of the melee-focused ship, alongside the game's general twin-stick shooter mechanics through clever patterns. That's very unique. Not something you'll see in many other shoot 'em ups. It's worth mentioning that some of the best bosses appear only through late game progression.
As you progress you'll unlock various stages of late game. These modify mostly enemy and boss bullet patterns, and intermittently introduce new bosses and room layouts. This sort of leads into one of my primary criticisms with the game. Which is that late game modifiers change enemy priority in a way that really messes with your muscle memory. I also don't like the harder variants of the room layouts mostly because they feel spammy.
There are also lore tidbits scattered mainly in the late game. There isn't any particular favoritism towards late game, it's just that you get more pieces of the puzzle, and for me the whole thing started clicking around here.
Storytelling is a mixed bag. Sometimes the game manages to be crystal clear without any dialogue, and sometimes it fills the text boxes with word vomit intended only for the lore-nerd super fans that only serve to confuse everyone else. It's also not particularly well-written for those bits.
As an aside, a funny little game balance anecdote. The devs realized the "triple" modifier which makes any weapon fire in triples was a teensy bit overpowered because it basically meant triple the DPS with no real downsides. So they over-corrected into making all weapons that fire in "volleys" weaker and more situational in general. Which kinda broke some of my favorite weapon combinations that weren't even strong to begin with.
Here's another. There is a sneak damage debuff on a later secret floor because the developers couldn't balance the cumulative damage gains from all the previous floors. They don't even tell you this happens! Fun, fun. I think the only way to figure it out is just sussing it out through sheer gamesense(tm) or joining the Discord.
All of this is because of the many, many content updates this game has received over the years. The BigMode update (that's the current one!) adds some of my favorite bosses in the entire game and overhauls the progression in a way I really like (and don't understand why they didn't do it this way from the start). My takeaway is that at some point, it clearly becomes too much to juggle. The added stuff is very nice but as they come, they come crashing down and moving the existing stuff around in unpredictable ways. All the interlocked mechanics that interact with each other in ways that keep slowly drifting into chaos as the individual elements are tweaked over and over. This... might actually affect your experience as a new player. It's worth it though. Just keep at it, the general game skill will carry you through many knowledge checks and so-called noob traps. If you're confused about something, trial and error has never let me down. The wiki for the game is under construction but all the core information is there if you want to resort to that.
Weird confession and I promise, I actually love this game despite how much I whine about it. A big factor in that is the gorgeous soundtrack. Almost 3 hours of chiptune compositions made with the same tool as the one used in Kero Blaster. Really top-tier stuff here.
Is this game for you? Would you like a tightly designed, bite-sized rogue-lite with a charming aesthetic? Can you look past its flaws I can't anymore as a tired gamer who put way too much time into this one video game for some reason? I can assure you that there is enough content here to justify the asking price.
Some random assortment of points I couldn't segue into:
- Meta-progression isn't huge here, you can probably unlock everything you care about sans loops in like 5 or 6 runs if you know what you're doing. I still wish there was less of it.
- Half the weapons in the shop are annoying to use. It's an important skill to figure out which ones to disable so they free up space in the loot pool.
- In terms of accessibility; I mean, there's a photosensitivity option that's not really all there, and a controller auto aim that's in the works at the time of writing. Good enough for me.
- Maybe set the game resolution to one of the pixel perfect scaled ones. They're the 580p and 870p ones. Yes the game internally runs at 290p. Don't even ask. They should have done some kind of prescaling instead.
(Here I used to complain about the outdated GOG build but it's updated now. Cheers!)
Long story short I used to play on the GOG build, but it wasn't updated for a while with the new BigMode content so I switched here and got some 40 hours with the new stuff. None of that matters now as they updated the GOG build.