izigame.me

This could have been a good game, but it really is not. The developer has a good history with similar types of games in the shadow run universe, and one would have assumed that this would also have worked in a pulp action novel setting. But it does not.
The primary gameplay loop is parts repetitive, parts clunky and parts plain tedious. You run your team of agents through the same set pieces repeatedly to gather worthless resources or to reduce the difficulty of the three main missions you must run until you get to the final.
The agents are not balanced against one another. You quickly establish your A team and maybe one backup, and you will be using them over and over again. Which is a shame, because on paper these could be interesting characters. You lack the resources to properly develop multiple, and with some being clearly superior to others, why would you bother.
The characters sadly do not add much to the story. The story does not add much to the story. The game would like you to be invested in the struggle against unsurmountable odds, but what it boils down to is, that you all sit in a mansion on an island and you go out on a number of fetch-quests to unlock the entrance to the big shiny tower and stop the bad guys from completing their respective apocalypse scenario.
Which also happens to be one of the bigger plot holes for me. The three antagonists have mutually exclusive goals. They cannot achieve their goal without actively denying it their allies theirs. Why would they be willing to work together? They have no competition, save the rag tag band of mercenaries and it is established early on, that they are not the sort of people to let anyone stand in their way. Maybe that’s a staple of such stories, but I found it off putting.
The gameplay is separated into real time sneaking and scouting parts and the turn-based combat sections.
I found the latter to be entertaining, up to a certain point. There is little enemy variety. Apart from a few monsters that show up over the course of the game, you are fighting the gas mask mook brigade, all the way to the end.
The enemies increase in numbers, but you usually quickly take care of that. What makes it a grind are the frequent reinforcement points, that needlessly stretch these fights out. First, they spawn the same enemies, that you just put into the ground, and second they do so on a timer. You know exactly when they arrive, from which point. Which makes it super easy to dispatch them, but really you are taking four to five extra turns to wait for these poor saps to show up, so you can mow them down in one turn.
The real time sneaking parts are necessary I suppose. You do need to explore the area, but it's done in such a clunky fashion, that I stopped lining up everything perfectly after the third or fourth encounter. You hide your guys behind one of the many, many chest-high obstacles littered around. Which you must do, one by one. First you ungroup the character. Then you move them into position. And then you can do so for the next. Which does not sound so bad, but it cannot be done in parallel. One at a time. And after a while this loses its charm, because after you fire your first shot enemies’ scramble. And if that happens all your careful positioning may have lost its edge. A bit frustrating.
Overall, this could have been an interesting game. The set pieces do look interesting. But they are used in the same configuration repeatedly. Even in the special main missions. The character artwork has its charm, but the characters are cardboard cutouts. The story is nonexistent. The gameplay gets stale very quickly.
For those that are wondering. I did manage to complete the game on standard difficulty. I wanted to see if there was more to it, than the poor first impression I got in the first two hours. Did not improve. Cannot recommend. Spend your money and time on something else.