izigame.me

TL;DR I don't know why but this game feels too slow/off for me while also not being a walk in the park. Might honestly just be me.
-I think I might just be bad but the movement feels really weird and kind of unintuitive. The only real example of this I can point to is bullet jumping, as it feels like an odd thing to do, but, there's also something about just moving and jumping around the stages that just feels OFF to me.
- Enemies die too slow/don't feel like I get powerful fast enough, with items feeling kind of hit or miss sometimes. Some feel impactful, others feel negligible.
- Literally everything costing HP. I thought this was an awesome mechanic at first, but some things just don't feel like they'd be worth my HP, whether cheap or not. For example, I got an item that had a 40% chance to fully heal me when taking a lethal hit (that cost me all my health) and almost immediately after taking it, I got hit and had my run end.
- Combo meter doesn't feel flashy/well designed enough to feel like maintaining it should be a high priority. I love how in Hotline Miami the colors flash and you get to see your combo get higher and higher the farther you go, but here it feels like it's just a background element.
- I feel like there's too many animations/transitions for going between rooms, starting a run, opening a chest, etc. that all just end up making things feel kind of sluggish.
- Having to use both celestial weapons AND a dash can feel a bit clunky, though I rebinded both of these to my mouse (M2 for dash, scroll wheel/M3 for celestial weapons) so maybe that one is my fault,
- I don't like range being a stat. It makes it feel lame when I shoot at an enemy and my bullet disappears but their's makes it from one end of the level to the other.
- Something about dropping through platforms feels off to me but I don't know why exactly
- Traps feel pretty hard to distinguish from the level sometimes
(These next few are personal, but then again this entire review is personal to begin with anyways) Besides obvious themes/motifs about grief and the NPCs, I don't sense much of a story/narrative so I don't really feel compelled at all to play because the gameplay just feels off for me already. The music also lost its charm pretty quickly and as far as I know there's no alternate tracks.
Maybe I'm just not in the right state to enjoy it right now and I'll come back some day with a positive review adjusting/correcting some of the things I've said, but I just don't find it fun, and it's a shame because I've heard a lot of good things about it and got sad when I heard that the dev(s) were prevented from continuing development on a huge update for the game (that's currently in open beta) by the publishers.
I wouldn't recommend this to anyone who isn't REALLY into roguelites and especially NOT to anyone new to the genre, as I feel like there would be better options for them to try out like The Binding of Isaac, Dead Cells, Hades, Nuclear Throne, Enter The Gungeon, etc.