izigame.me

I'm going to start this off by saying this game isn't a farming sim like Stardew Valley, it's a life sim, closer to something like animal crossing (which is pretty obvious from looking at the description, but a couple years ago when I was looking for a farming sim and bought this game, I was slightly disappointed so just a fair warning lol)
This game has a lot of good things, some mediocre things, and quite a bit of bad things so this might be a bit long. So tl:dr, this game has a unique time system that is action-based rather than real-time, has a lot of skills to upgrade, requires you to grind a lot to make progress, and has a lot of progression locked behind drawing the right blueprints through weekly randomized shop items, which only really becomes an issue mid to late-game. The dialogue and npcs are fun and nice at first but are incredibly one-dimensional and are kind of just there as a mechanic. This game is for people who like grinding and collecting OR want a fairly simple easy game to play during breaks that is easily pauseable and/or quick to get to the next save between days since its timer allows you to go at whatever speed you want to, and for people who like organizing and designing homes/towns and making things look pretty. This game is NOT for people who want an engaging story, or unique and interesting characters since all of the characters can be described in like 3 sentences or less, there is also a minimal sense of progression in the game and it feels like you're doing things for the sake of doing something rather than gaining meaningful insight or benefits from doing so (not a bad thing, just not a lot of people's things honestly).
ok, now to get started on the full review.
The good:
This game has a VERY good time system. Instead of making the time system real-time, like virtually every farming sim and life sim on the market, they decided to make the time based on how many actions you perform rather than actual real-time. it forces you to think about what you want to do in your limited time and go slower and more relaxed than just simply go as fast as you physically can because it takes so much time to get back to a season you missed something in that it feels like a chore to try go progress until then and this mitigates almost all of that extra stress from having a timer, which also makes the game so much more friendly for people who want to play something during breaks since how fast the days progress is entirely self-paced and there is no punishment for going slowly or quickly. This is almost single-handedly the reason I played so much of this game since it's something you don't see nearly often enough.
The leveling system in this game is unique since there are skills for virtually everything (gathering, crafting, farming, mining, woodcutting, bug catching, fishing, merchanting (selling stuff in your town), cooking, and even one for the card game that they made named Tarott Monster) and almost all of them feel pretty worthwhile in terms of rewards (excluding the card game, that one is entirely optional and gives you few rewards, the only real reward for that one is if you have fun playing the card game itself). This is one thing that they could have done a lot more with, though, so there are some elements that are better than others for this. The thing I enjoyed the most about the leveling is specifically the merchanting and crafting since they both feel like natural progression that gives good benefits (allows you to earn more money and have more slots to sell things in / gives you more resources when crafting and allows you to use fewer resources which makes it take less energy).
The town system is very good, specifically the fact that you can go into a building/moving mode to place stuff anywhere you want, and manipulate everything, adding water, higher pieces of land, instantly move buildings to different places, it's so easy and simple but very well executed, it allows for people who get irritated from trying to put a lot of effort into making their town look pretty to actually do so without nearly as many problems since the interface is so user-friendly.

The mediocre/neutral:
The town hall is a unique take on an upgrade system that enables you to have more benefits from unique things, like getting more money from selling specific resources, get more benefits from specific npcs, increase the time you have in a day, expanding the number of fruit trees/plants that you can have at a time, and more. This is a system that I personally like, especially later in the game, but it feels fairly unbalanced due to the fact that you're given three things to upgrade at the start of the week that you have the option of purchasing with money, and those are completely random. Since you don't have much money at the start of the game, you can get screwed over by hoping for an energy upgrade to appear and then not getting one to spawn for a whole month. This is a reoccuring problem that I will touch on later in the bad section. The reason this isn't in the bad is because this is solved later in the game when you aren't impacted by a lack of money and are just able to buy all three upgrades every week with no problems, but even then that isn't exactly the best solution, it just feels good to be able to buy out every shop all the time with maximum merchanting and loads of money.
This game is almost entirely a grinding game, which can be good or bad depending on the person. For me, I don't like games where the sole purpose is to grind for resources for multiple days to finally upgrade a building and then be back to square one of getting resources and crafting them again. This game, however, does it relatively well, mostly that the grinding is made more manageable because of how I played the game, using it as a semi-mindless break in between working, which imo is really where this game shines. Even just looking at the achievements shows how incredibly grindy this game is (there are achievements for catching 2500 fish, harvesting 4,000 crops, chopping 6000 trees, etc.) It has a specific niche which is good, but if you actively dislike mass grinding in games, this game is definitely not for you.

The bad:
The shops are entirely luck-based for what they have in stock, which isn't necessarily a bad thing until you find that you have to wait an entire year for a single piece of furniture that you need the blueprint for to show up so that you can complete an npc's quest for their house, which you happen to need to do at least twice, up to four times per npc. This is by far the worst thing about this game and the main reason I stopped playing; I could only complete maybe two people's quests because this took so long to actually complete. It's good that this problem only starts to become detrimental after you've spent over 25 hours in the game or else I would have played almost none of this game, it's only kind of annoying before you get to the point where you literally need these random items to progress since before that point you actually have other things you can do.
The npcs are very plain and have little character. They exist for the sake of having people to talk to and quests to give, and they are fun at first but quickly become boring. Them following you around is cute, and relationships between them are a good idea, but very poorly executed. It feels like how Animal Crossing New Horizons did it, where characters kind of just like you all the time because you're the main character and are awesome. You don't play this game for the writing, though the minimal story at the beginning is kind of cute but that's it.
Overall, this game has a lot of really good concepts that makes the game worth playing in my opinion but lacks content in a lot of other places, and a lot of the concepts that are genuinely good are only half-cooked. I think this game has more good than bad, but depending on the person, this could be a disappointing purchase.