izigame.me

TL;DR, feels more like an alpha or other early build of game, needing more polish.
The curb appeal of this game is there; you can be like Daredevil or John Wick and fight a crowd of dudes in a claustrophobic room without needing godlike reflexes because it's turn based? Sounds cool, sign me up.
First problem, there are too many variables to keep track of, and not a quick/simple way to do so. Early fights will have few enemy variants (each with their own ability, or combination of abilities), and it's easy to keep track of what enemy can do what. Later fights however, you'll likely have to check what each enemy can do most every turn. Some enemy abilities are displayed with an icon, but not all, for some reason. They could be more easily identified via colour, given the minimalist art design- but there are several similar colours so again, you're checking what each enemy can do each turn.
Second, damage. Very quickly you'll realise most damage moves are, not great. doing 5-10 damage when the enemy has 40, 80, or 200 health is, again, not great. Especially given that you're normally outnumbered. There are better moves sure, but this is a deckbuilding game, so you can pull movement cards when you need damage, damage when you need block, and block when you need movement. There are better cards sure, but you have to get and/or upgrade them, and pull them on the proper turn. Some cards also require special positioning, and you'll get to play them maybe 1/4 of the time you want to, every other time they are pulled it's a dead draw, clogging your hand from a potentially useful card.
Third, (building on point 2) I don't think this game benefits much (if at all) from being a deckbuilder. I know I don't have many hours in the game, and there are almost certainly some synergies out there I don't know about, but even with different starting decks, the runs I did felt samey because the same cards showed up in rewards. perhaps there are different card pools available, idk. Movement is also so critical to not dying, and some enemies can act in-between individual actions you take, so pulling enough damage to kill every enemy is not a reliable solution to not having sufficient block/movement. Feels like this game would be better as a turn based puzzle game, with any and all of your moves available but on cooldown (X movement per turn, Y energy to spend on actions)
Fourth, Replays. Man... so sad. Replays are not as fluid as you'd want them to be, heck NEED them to be to be cool. It's not SUPERHOT where your actions are played back in realtime at superhuman speed. Each character moves there exact move as they did in game, pauses, then next move. It's robotic, it's janky, but mostly, it's uncool to watch. Granted simultaneous movement of multiple characters would go against what actually happened in-game, but regardless, as they are- they kinda suck.
Maybe I should've watched gameplay before buying, I had played some other deckbuilders and this one seemed cool. However I don't believe this to near the replay-ability of other, similar games

I'm gamedev myself and that's what I think

Uniqueness 8/10

* Fighting roguelike overall is an interesting idea. Additionally, there are many interesting ideas, like building up combo, using obstacles (like jump off the wall), tossing enemies into their allies bullets and so on
* Fights are like puzzles. You should use your surrounding, plan your moves

Gameplay 2/10

There are many problems:
* It feels not very dynamic despite all cool mechanics
* The main problem that many cards are pretty weak, amount of good strategies is very limited (for example, you cannot build counter-attack only, because you would have big problems with some enemies), permanent bonuses doesn't change gameplay much, so you're runs difference is based only on cards and, as I said, there are some problems with them
* I particularly didn't like challenges in each battle. For each room you have set of 3 challenges, for example: win in n turns or push enemies 3 times which forces you to play as a game says, not as you want and also eliminates many builds not very agile to complete different challenges (you receive rewards for completing them, so they're very crucial for success). When I play rogue like games I enjoy building different stuff in runs, you know
* Another problem that easier difficulties give you guaranteed movement card and I don't know why. If you wanted player to move in each round, you could make it a separate mechanic, not overcrowded his hand
So overall, many problems

Progression 5/10

You can unlock new "agents" (different starting decks) and some cards. Nothing crazy, nothing terrible either

Replayability 1/10

Replayability is the weakest part of the game, while it's rogue like
The problems that there are not many builds, almost no deck building and as a result it becomes repetitive pretty soon
I got bored very quickly, and I personally would estimate possible play time to 5 hours. Concept great, but too many problems

Controls/UI 4/5

Didn't encounter any bugs. I feel like UI could be better, it can be hard to tell what a card does, despite them having similar actions

Design overview

Worth mentioning (positive) - It's simply amazing. Cool design, smooth animations
Worth mentioning (negative) -

Other data

❌ Challenging
✅ Simple (minimalistic)
❌ High entry threshold

Overall rating 20/60 (3/10)

Great concept and amazing design, but has too many problems with gameplay and replayability

Extra

Follow my curator page Dev inspiration for more reviews

This game, bar one feature is actually really good. I have, at the time of writing this; nearly 500 hours on this game. I have reached the maximum level you can attain and quiet possibly at the time of reading, have every achievement. Though all this positivity is unfortunately dashed by one horrid failure in game design.
The game does not draw it's cards at random, nor does it do so fairly. The game makes no advertisement or mention of this fact; but the game will intentionally draw cards that minimise your potential to avoid damage. Eventually you will be caught out by this, as the game will randomly place enemies at the start of each level. This means that the longer you play, the greater the risk you will be unlucky enough to die without any fault of your own. You are then essentially forced to replay until you get lucky enough to avoid nigh-certain death.
This is needless and very strange, because there is enough randomisation to ensure sufficient difficulty, the card rewards you get at the end of each level are random, the challenges for extra rewards are random and the aforementioned enemy placement is also randomised.
There was no need to have this system in place, it's cheap and undermines the entire point of the game, you are not just at the mercy of chance, but the game actively attempts to sabotage you all whilst trying to conceal this fact.
Only one of the six difficulties disables this, the easiest difficulty in the game. The brief tool-tip mentions this feature only in so far as to ensure you get a movement card every turn; confirming that the game does indeed calculate what best means to limit your movement unless you pick this specific difficulty. You are forced to ignore 5/6 difficulty modes if you don't want the game to actively conspire against you and ensure your failure.