izigame.me

Well I wanted to like this game and thought I'd give it a chance once it went on sale, and frankly yeah I can see why it's got mixed reviews. Uncharacteristically I'm going to need to start with the setbacks on the game because they're the most deleterious part of the collective experience for what, from what I've seen from trailers, is marketed primarily for its customization tools and what it lets you construct.
Minuses
Pacing and Progression.
Picture: you've just bought a game titled CUSTOM MECH WARS that promises capabilities of building wacky war machines of all shapes and sizes, of robot dogs or centaurs or funky spiders, you see parts or potential to recreate something cool you saw, like slamming a car on top of your torso and calling it Megas XLR, or using funky spider legs and big railguns to make an SSC Death's Head.
BUT FIRST... you need to do the tutorial for piloting mechs, during which you use a small premade set of mechs for a couple of missions, the first couple of which deliberately prevent you from using certain buttons to practice or discover. Only about after 1-2 hours of that, THEN you finally get a tutorial on how to actually customize your machines. Throughout all of this very little opportunity for experimentation is allotted to the player, and the limit of what your first "custom" mech will look like is basically the same as the default one except with maybe a square piece of armor and an L-shaped piece of armor slapped onto it I Guess. You CAN dismantle the starter models to experiment, sure, but unless you play missions, you won't be able to access the options to buy/craft components from your list of discovered pieces - of which you basically can only expand by picking up enemy drops. Making matters even more convoluted is the fact that the pieces you gather can vary in rarity and size (supposedly on the latter, I've yet to find anything yet from all these drops that's larger than S) and even more screwed up is that you can level up(?) individual parts to raise their stats - If the goal here is to make builds interchangeable or to encourage experimenting with various different robot shapes, why would you add that as a factor? All through this, the method by which you "grind up EXP" is to go through campaign missions, which really highlight the snails pace at which it narrates your efforts to defend earth from teleporting angel-robot hackers or something. At the very least all the post-killing-everything chatter gives you plenty of time to scrub the entire battlefield for the part pickups and EXP-crates that "train up" your mech's parts.
The promise of a game that prides itself on making custom mechs requires you to grind for it, and nowhere are there features to meaningfully share designs or experiment in a sandbox build-mode to see exactly what kind of crazy leg-trains or hamburger mechs you can make.
UI and Information
Now you'd expect a game called CUSTOM MECH WARS to have good tools for making your mechs, right..? Unfortunately the interface is heavily saddled with presumption that you're going to be using chiefly a gamepad for it. Nowhere is there options to map your keys to functions, and instead the keyboard binding seems to just interpret specific (undocumented) keys to certain buttons (I remember something like pressing Shift randomly and it doing something that would've been mapped to my B button on a menu for example.) While this is semi-acceptable for the gameplay loop of actually piloting the mechs, any depth the mech-construction tools that are given to you are saddled with requirements and expectations of using controllers - expect many sliders you have to LMB/RMB to adjust, imprecise HSV color pickers you need to finagle with analog stick + LT + LB?? and long, LONG lists of potential parts you can only sort on filters that won't even be relevant for what is seeming to me like the first 30 missions of the game! (Again! I haven't found a single part that isn't S.)
Even more cursed is how the filters for things like Accessories in the Builder and the Research Center aren't even consistent! For whatever reason the creator lets me categorize the parts by things like armor/decoration/lights/etc, but instead when I'm trying to make another copy of a matching Left Shoulder Pad or something, the only things I can sort on in research is the newest stuff I received, the oldest stuff I received, and the size-scaling of a piece? And now I need to sift through an ever growing stack of randomly, opaquely-named Delta-Codpiece Plates to find that matching Shoulder Pad I'm trying to create.
Also all made more infuriating is how information regarding certain weapons, body parts, and components are conveying multiple sentences of information on how they work with the world's slowest single-line text marquee. For all I know this might've worked much better with the native language where individual kanji can probably impart a lot more information than letters, but to my knowledge literally the only place to read part information in a sane multi-line block is on the mission-complete screen for drops - where you can't even get a point of reference for how the piece even looks. Also some descriptions just flat-out lie to you what they do, and other aspects of the UI, like the mech's "radar map" of stats are completely nonsensical (I stack 3 bazookas onto a build and it has an "A" ranking in ATK, but then suddenly I add a shotgun and it becomes a "B"? What?) And what the hell is RES? I'm still not even sure why torso even have stats correlating to Boosters when they don't seem to change the listing in the lower-left for Boost duration/power, and apparently the accessories for thrusters that say they "improve boost duration and power" are just flat-out lying - but then apparently the Kinetic Shields and Electromagnetic Shields actually work?? WHY IS COLORING THINGS SO HARD?! WHY DO YOU KEEP DEFAULTING EVERYTHING I'M TRYING TO COLOR IN CHUNKS BACK TO GREY WITH EXACTLY 50 METALLIC AND 50 SMOOTHNESS??
Repetitive, Shallow, Buggy
With almost absolutely no preparation and just making missile-boat stacking wide monstrosities that ram into stuff with drills, I consistently get S-Ranks on almost every mission I do on Normal. Maybe I can progress faster if I graduate to Hard, but the thing is that the game's mechanics are described so opaquely on whether things I change actually matter or not, effects on weapons are conveyed so slowly, and because for whatever reason your legs are your most important vital organ, is that it's an experience I really don't want to engage with more than I can tolerate.
Supposedly just stacking a bunch of accessories on every part does a big part towards increasing your durability (big deal if you're like me and enamored by melee mechs since there's mech contact damage - Forward Facing Drills on my arms not actually held in my hands seem to work the best given they don't force me to flail my arms around wildly.) Making weapon copies of the exact same gun on top of eachother (to conceal it's actually six quantum-superimposed shotguns instead of just one) feels like an exploit but gets brutal results where I just one-shot most things my size.
You get droves of purple powerup dice to basically cover for any deficiencies your design might have, and there's cases where I've wiped out entire starting waves of enemies before the level intro dialog has even finished. In at least one case in Mission 30, something I did ended up breaking one of the AngelMech's "teleports behind you" scripting and they were just stuck walking in place, unable to be damaged by anything.
Plusses
Whew ok this game some props:

good body part base designs (too bad I have to cover them with accessories or massive missile pods)
excellent anatomical flexibility, yup you can have 8 arms!

RanOutOfLetters.