izigame.me

I wanted to like this game, the effects looked quite nice, but that's all there is to this game. You'll be stuck in a never-ending cascade of pretty but quickly boring landscapes with nothing to do but roam and have a truckload of endless loading screens despite having a pretty good machine, weaved with an incoherent story and a bit of combat in between.
Story & scenario
The story takes place on a post-apocalyptic Earth, where Avril, the main character will suddenly becomes a Champion for 2 gods, Sun and Moon and gets infused with super powers. The how or why literally doesn't matter and you'll have no explanations for this. You fall down a weird waterfall and pop comes the powers after finding a statue of the gods. Then you'll be transported to other worlds... I would have liked to see more of this Earth, where people say it's dangerous, but you'll see none of it except the tutorial, not even any of the problems mentioned.
You'll basically be transported to lands of each element: Earth, Air, Water and Fire (in this order), beat some enemies senselessly, resolve a couple of quests, beat a boss, get transported to the next world where your friend will (almost) ALWAYS land somewhere away from you where you have to find her... Come on.
The dialogs have a funny touch sometimes, but I found that the attitude of the main character completely derailled after 2 or 3 dialogs and she just went with rolling a die to determine her mindset for the next line of dialog with no consistency what-so-ever.
Sometimes the game will ask you to make choices according to two trends: Defender (one would think the sacrifice oneself for the others way) or Conqueror (I'm gonna punch everybody's face in). First of, those 2 paths do not correspond to the main character who seems adventurous and curious, but want to help her friend. From time to time, you'll have to make a choice towards either of those directions, but none of them are what you want or seem to correspond to the actual trend and several times I actually stopped for a moment with a "wow, wtf?" moment. The choices you make along the way do not seem to really matter, just affecting the story slightly and you'll still end up having to roam around, fight baddies or solve a puzzle.
Visuals
What brought me to this game was the visuals: a nice whirlwind of purple in orange around pretty landscapes. The character design is also very impressive and I love the art in the game. The effects overall are pretty well done too.
With the 2 forms (Body/Spirit or Sun/Moon), your character aspect will change appearance and that's a part that's quite well done visually, each skills is and feels unique.
The landscapes left me breathless the first time I arrived in each new world, there was some nice details put in them that leaves you pin point some things and want to discover. But make about 10 steps and you'll quickly realise that what you saw will be the only elements you'll witness in the whole level, making it ultra-repetitive and boring.
The enemies are... inconsistent. One can barely see what they are as they always blend a bit in the environment. They split their attacks between either body, mind or sometimes both for the bigger ones. Unless you spend time to learn each of their attack patterns with diligence, they will just be a blur with almost no way of distinction between their attacks.
Mechanics
The game presents you with a duality of Body and Mind where each have their own attacks and health bars and you can switch at any time during the game. Enemies are also split into those 2 like described earlier. This was actually great and felt pretty creative, as you have to shift regularly to defeat your enemies. In normal play, attacks you make with one of the aspects inflicts half damage on the monsters of the other aspects.
The fighting had a great touch and requires you to react in a matter of milliseconds to avoid attacks, because as described earlier, you will not see what will be happening until you see the attack, which is sometimes the enemy charging you with ludicrous speed. The biggest complaint I have with the fighting is that the Body form and its sword felt underwhelming. If you bash your enemies, you'll get damaged because of the animation time and the lack of visibility.
Each bosses felt mostly unique, with a good mechanic of the 2 health bars for Body and Mind that you have to grind down, but not too much, because as soon as one segment goes out, you have to destroy the rest of the other form's segment quickly or everything heals, forcing you to use both forms to fight the boss. Also, they also have two forms, but they are immune to the damages of the other and have their own set of attacks for each.
The puzzles are neat, requiring you a bit of thinking sometimes, utilising both forms Body and Spirit. Some platforms will only be "walkable" according to the form you're in, you'll be able to remote control balls to go to switches and levers, moving platforms and all. It started very well until the level designers put platforms that overlapped between Body and Mind, making them extremely difficult to determine what was happening. Just put them as plain platforms if the form doesn't matter...
Finally I have to mention the zoom mechanic and the camera: you can zoom out or zoom in with 2 levels of vision while you play, where one is supposed to help you better see the landscapes and the path, and the other one zooms in to help you see in a fight. Problem is that the fight arenas are either too big so to see the enemies that will shoot at you you'll have to zoom out, but if you do so you'll lose proper vision on what's happening right around you. An in-between view only would have been better. As for the camera, I think it's a lesson that was learned a long time ago: don't lock the camera! This was so frustrating, exceptionally against bosses where their attacks would pop at the front of the scene, monopolising half of your screen.
Character customisation
The game offers a character stats customisation via a system of points of differnt kind with which you can slot runes. You can directly feel this aspect was half baked in the game as the interface is barely there for this: there's only one bar where you'll slot all your runes and there's no filtering (at least by type of alphabetically, guys, come on). You quickly understand that runes are not upgrades, they just let you trade one stat for another, only a handful will be a straight up bonus. In the end, I didn't feel any difference while playing with the runes and no real "build" can be made.
Sound & Music
The voice acting is properly done, props to the voice actresses who had to follow the constant mood change of Avril and Mai. On the other end, the big entities are voiced quite poorly, barely audible over the music because of some reverberation.
I didn't notice the music too much and apart from some dialogues, it never got in the way of the game, so I'd say they did a good job for this.
Other considerations
I'll say this once: do not prevent the player from playing if there's nothing important!. Oh the amount of loading screens, knowing that all require you to press space to continue but still they take several seconds, and sequences that will prevent you from playing (looking at you stupid quest update messages), it was sooooo frustrating!