izigame.me

Im going to start off by saying that I think the dev team has a lot of talent and I cant wait to see how they take their experience with this game and use it to make something in the future. The art team especially went crazy in this game, and it is beautiful as a result.

However,

This is not a game that I can in good faith recommend to anyone else. Let me explain

This game suffers from a number of serious issues that i will go into below

This Should Have Been A Boss Rush
In my opinion, this game should have been a boss rush. The most enjoyable parts of the game was seeing the environments and fighting the bosses. If you have played games like Eldest Souls, both are pretty achievable, and this game would have benefited from it, because the worst parts were finding the collectibles(of which I couldn't find all of them) and fighting the small enemies, whom of which not a single one were enjoyable to fight.

The Sound Design Is All Over The Place
Why the F does a regular non perfect parry have nearly the same sound as getting hit? How do I learn what moves are giving me trouble when I have to stare at the screen and not the health bar and cant hear what the game is trying to tell me? This would have been such an easy fix too. This is especially bad in the final boss

Missable Achievements
This game came out in 2023, its not really excusable for half the achievements to be entirely missable.

Inconsistent Telegraphing, Parrying And tracking
Why are some moves unreactable for no reason? Why cant the final boss track me like at all? Why do some of my parries still work when I missclick by a million years, but others feel like accuracy to a couple frames is necessary? The boss fights are the highlight of this game, and they should have had longer to cook. Standout fights were butterfly phase 1, forest monkey phase 2, and final phase 1. Most of the others had a serious downside that made them less fun to fight.

This is a short game for the price. Tying back to the boss rush comment, this game could have had twice the bosses that took twice as long to fight and were more polished, and it would have been way better. the bosses are always either getting utterly steamrolled or winning, there is no middle ground, because once you half learn like 2 attack patterns you can always heal the mistakes easily. Also, the achievement to no hit a boss not being available in the section where you can just fight the bosses makes little sense.

Why be able to attack when most of the bosses take little damage and just run away when they aren't attacking? Why the quick time events that take away from what could have been incredible cutscenes? Why is there no way to track the meet again achievement? Why does playing on a lower difficulty make it so you cannot get the unlock all skill achievement because it reduces the amount of NON RESPAWNING enemies which have a vital resource tied to them? These are questions I kept finding myself asking and not finding answers.

This game is just a really really beautiful series of major game design and playtesting issues, but has the foundations to be awesome. I hope the developers take this feedback into account when designing the next game they make, because I fully believe they can make something awesome. If anyone would like to talk with me further about possibly improving the game or more in depth discussions about these issues, you have my email, I reached out to support 5 days ago.

TLDR this game has serious game design issues and I would not recommend playing it.