izigame.me

This is a very good game with an abysmal end game, meta and balance. I want to say this is a 10/10 game but in reality it is a 7/10 survivor roguelite. I could not fit everything I wanted to say.
-Gameplay: It is unfortunately very boring. I have to admit, I truly did not have much fun compared to other roguelites I have played and I have played a lot of roguelites. To sum it up for you, you struggle to survive the first 5-10 minutes, then start stabilising and killing until enemies cannot reach you then you sit in one spot and wait for the next 10-15 minutes to be over. It is a slog-fest if you ask me. I enjoyed the first 40 hours of the game because you had to be on your toes at any given moment. Now with patch 1.0, I literally play another game on my phone while I wait for my Halls of Torments run to finish. It is not engaging at all especially with the broken items that are now available from the start. I truly believe it was a mistake to allow players to bring up green items because balance is now absurdly broken.
-Progression: Long grind. Requires a lot of runs to get started for equipment, potions and gold, then even more hurdles to get artefacts, tormented souls, green equipment and even more gold. Honestly it takes too long that the rewards do not seem like rewards. It has been rewarding to be able to do +28 artefacts but the cost was too much in my opinion. There is also no gold sink at the moment, so you will eventually end up hoarding up gold since there is nothing you can use it for other than the vault, which is useless in my mind.
The quest system is abysmal. XP is directly linked to the quests you have completed which means you cannot have an efficient run unless you start completing quests. There are 500 quests for a total of 150% XP. Some quests require you to be able to achieve a certain level or power spike, meaning you cannot do them until you have completed the rest of the quests or at least some that you require. Also some quests have traits or upgrades attached to them making them important to complete for power spikes. Not having any of these in your arsenal means your runs are severely hindered. Why is this terrible? Because it hinders your gameplay and forces you to do gimmicky quests so you are able to have efficient runs. I really like the quest system as a tracker since I am a completionist. What I despise and hate is the way they hide traits and powers that should be in my arsenal behind a stupid quest. I would have not minded if they said "Complete +15 artefact with Warlock" and get Trait V or something like that. That is a good challenge which would probably drive me crazy until I achieve it. "Get 25 move speed. Get warlock to 1 health. Reach 50% critical chance with exterminator". These are more irritations than challenges. They are "waste my time" quests. Sure, they are easy and probably good enough to teach players how to use potions to maximise traits and stats.
-Game Length: Not having a x2 or a short version of a run is a massive negative. Most of the time I was AFK. I would reach unkillable status very quickly and had to wait extensive periods of time for the run to finish. I would prefer a 15 min game mode or even 10 min of chaos than a 30 min run. Usually 30 min is 30 plus 10-15 min of clicking through stuff. It is just too long and does not give a good incentive to keep playing. What helped me power through the game was the achievements.
-End game: Not good. Ran out of space.
-Equipments: Blood Catcher (Enhancement). That is all I have to say about items. If you are not wearing this, you are a fool. This item needs to be removed or nerfed to the ground. I am pretty sure this is the only item that allows you to do +30 artefact runs. I have not tried duellist's spark which seems it could be good, regardless Blood Catcher not only heals you, it increases your damage per stack. In one of my runs, I had 5000% extra damage because of that stupid amulet. No other equipment compares.
Ignoring blood catcher, there are loads of fun equipment to use and this patch allows you to double up and rings so I usually get both green echo band. Also allows you to streamline builds that were previously was not possible or not viable. There are load of builds you can do and mostly they will be decent. I caution people to actually see what damage types their character's have as I have seen people using Echo band (Reach) without having any physical damage to proc it, wasting a good ring slot for nothing.
-Characters: Good amount of different characters with each having their own unique set of skills. Some of them are tedious to play with since they have a specific build to even be viable, some not good at all. For example, Norseman and shield maiden are the best characters in the game because of their shield block. Some of you might not understand this but at +15 artefacts you basically need massive amounts of defence and shield block to even survive the early onslaught. Any innate bonuses to defence makes you able to resist damage plus the mark of shield maiden makes your damage scale with shield block and then gives you the option for even more shield block. You can try to make builds without shield block but I think you would need to be insanely good at this game to even succeed. Ultimately, fragile characters fail to even survive the first few seconds of the hardest challenges this game has to offer.
Regardless of endgame, all characters seem to have a decent play style and can derive some fun from them. Some characters like sage and warlock can be exceedingly fun to use and push quite a bit of the challenges ahead of you. Since they are not balanced appropriately, they can do loads of crazy stuff. On the other hand, Exterminator and Beast huntress are quite bland and not really entertaining, not really achieving much and not fun at all. Overall, there is definitely a character for everyone, even though I would welcome more characters and different playstyles.
-Abilities: Massive problem here. All skills suck except ring blades, transfixion, phantom needles and morning star. The rest are utter garbage, do not even pick them and if you get them randomly do not bother levelling them up. Lightning strikes and astronomer's orbs might be decent to level up but really depends the type of build you are going with. What matters in this game is damage output. How quickly can you kill and where. Ring blades is the best at this and the rest are not even comparable. Getting cyclone and range upgrades allows you to not only kill everything with ease, it usually happen off screen. This means as soon as they spawn on the map, they will die and spawning a new set and those will die, repeating the cycle. This means highest kill count in the game. With Ring Blades maxed out, I had a lvl 154 shield maiden in one of my runs with almost 70k kills. It is absolutely broken and it should be balanced.
At the moment, there is literally no reason to get any other abilities other than for a smaller additional damage output or doing some gimmicky build like a spark build or projectiles. Also your FPS will drop to single digits with too many abilities. My favourite build is maxed out morning star with tinctured chain, making it hit everything on my screen which works very well if I make a physical damage build. Certainly I am being pessimistic about abilities as they surely all work in some fashion early stages of the game but once you start hitting the harder challenges, you will never pick radiant aura or meteor strikes again. I hope new abilities are coming and balancing.
-Theme: Love the Diablo-like theme, dark and gritty. I even like the blurring option to make it more retro. Love the fact that each level has its own dangerous creatures to send hordes at you and are distinctive. The hellish theme is fantastic and the soundtrack really adds to the atmosphere.