izigame.me

TLDR: 9/10 A great fast-paced, short-but-sweet rougelike that's so easy to lose track of time playing. If you think you have good reaction time, then think again. This game is absolutely brutal.

Actual Review (No Spoilers)
You could very easily mistake this for an arcade game. It's got an old-school aesthetic and quarter-munching difficulty that would have made bank if it came out back in the day. The gameplay loop is really polished with basically zero downtime between runs, and the entire runtime of the game on average is like 7-10 minutes. Overall the entire package is just really refined and concise, but it still has a really high skill ceiling. This game is all about dodging enemies, losing as little health as possible, and hoping you get good upgrades.
So when I say the skill ceiling is really high, basically 70% of your skill at this game is how fast your reaction time is. You will be falling towards enemies at breakneck speeds, all while trying to manage your ammo and keep your combo counter up. The retro 8-bit style not only looks cool, but also helps with readability, which is mega important in a game like this. You also get color palette swaps to further customize the look of the game.
For what the game is, I honestly would've given it a 10/10 if the upgrade system didn't have some annoying issues. Firstly, there are very clearly best and worst ones. Every upgrade has it's uses (especially combining certain ones with the different unlockable styles), but some upgrades are still pretty niche. Secondly, getting bad upgrades make runs WAY harder. You're pretty much screwed if you get bad rng unless you're totally cracked at games like these. Since you'll get about 75% of all upgrades per run anyway, its unlikely that you'll miss all the ones you want. But it's still really annoying when you get bad upgrades early on, or get good ones too late into a run to be fully useful. Thankfully the weapons aren't as skewed, and a lot of them really just come down to personal preference.
This is also one of those games with a couple "good fucking luck getting this" achievements. Every achievement comes down to putting in the time, but also just with the nature of rougelikes being random, it can take either a moderate amount of time, or will feel stupidly impossible. Worth it? Probably not unless you have too much time on your hands. But even if you don't, the game itself still is absolutely worth checking out. It's fun and rewarding and it's all wrapped up into a short but sweet package. 9/10