izigame.me

This thumbs-up is pretty tentative, as there's a lot of things in this game that bother me, and I think there's several similar roguelikes out there that are pretty similar that I'd generally prefer to play. That being said, I think it's not a bad game, and I appreciate that the devs seem to be working pretty hard on continued support for the game.

This is a side-scrolling, platformer, action roguelike. It takes some elements from other games, like having random little voiced dialogues with the characters back in the hub between runs, but orders of magnitude less than something like Hades: don't expect continued character interactions or relationships, or story developments in any of it, it's just minor little one off conversations about a boss you just fought or something.

Most of the actual combat gameplay comes from a robust spell system where you find spells, most of which are character specific, with randomized elemental affinities, and you socket elemental effects into them, causing them to shoot lasers when you cast them, or light enemies on fire when they hit, or loads of other stuff. It's a cool system that makes good runs end up with really unique feeling spells that do a lot of wacky stuff.
The system also has a lot of issues, however: you don't see very many spells in a run, especially early, and you need 4 of them. Oftentimes, this means 1 or 2 of your spells are pretty much always going to be spells that don't fit the rest of your build, or are spells that you don't like using due to awkward/slow projectiles, super long cast times, etc. or are just really bad spells that you basically never want to use in any fight, but like, it was slightly better than the starter placeholder spell and the other options were also bad.
These last 2 cases are way too common; way too many of the spells in the game have such long cast times that there are almost 0 scenarios where they can be casted in a boss fight without you being guaranteed to take damage for it, or have such slow projectiles that they can almost never be used to solidly hit any boss in the game before they teleport away to start a new attack. This is particularly frustrating, because you can't just only use 1 spell if you only find 1 good spell, your spells don't refresh until all 4 have been used. Add in that the spell levelups and elemental effect sockets basically require you to find spells you like early so that you can toss any good stuff you find into them, and you end up with a system that is much more punishing than pretty much any other roguelike I've played on finding sub-optimal tools during a run.
My favorite part of the genre is seeing what weird effects I find, and trying my best to make them work, so it's frustrating that so many of the options either do nothing for you, or are actively bad for you in like 90%+ of situations.

There's also just a lot of little other things that have irked me over the course of the game's development:
New weapon options got added so that you can change your characters's basic attacks and meaningfully change the way they feel to play. This is great! However, they didn't make it so that the weapons retroactively awarded to people who had already completed their requirements. Why am I required to do a run with a weapon I'm tired of on every single character individually in order to grind out the weapons so I can actually try the cool new stuff that was added?
A weapon swapping system was added to make the new weapon system even cooler, but I haven't even experimented with it very much and I've already found multiple weapon abilities that don't work at all if you weren't using that weapon when you entered the room; if I can't change to my daggers to get another mid air jump for annoying platforming sections, or change to a weapon for some occasional big situational effect it does, then what is really the point here?

At the end of the day, I think it's a reasonable game with some cool stuff, a dev team that seems dedicated to supporting and improving the game, and a decent amount of charm, but every time I play it or think about it, I do find myself wishing it was just a bit better in a bunch of areas. So, I think it's still a recommend from me, but probably only if you're looking at this game and think the overall vibe is really appealing.