izigame.me

This game is a downgrade in almost all aspects compared to its predecessor or maybe Kalyps just went and took the god awful aspects and made them worse / didn't improve them at all on purpose.
It is nice to have Thalya back and seeing her story progress just for you to be introduced to new characters that should have been in the 3rd game but weren't even mentioned like her step brother. Or they bring back dead characters like Thanos just to drag out the story. It is basically the good / evil Thalya arc from the 3rd game, but now you have her step brother as the good boy character and that is just fucking BOOOOOOORING and lazy .
Maybe after Kalypso has addressed some balancing issues and some of the bugs in the game it will be fun to play. As it is right now, I just can't recommend it.
The good:
+ Nice quality of life improvements
+ some good room additions
+ Nice UI overhaul. Took me some time to get used to, but now I can see the appeal
+ All the good pop-culture stuff again. Nice.
The bad:
- The research tree(s). They are now 4 trees: Dungeon, Horde, Demon, Undead which need you to invest on two fronts. First you need to upgrade the main path to then upgrade the lower branches. Contrived and unnecessary. Expensive to research and just not fun because sometime really strong improvements are hidden behind a massive, MASSIVE paywall for no good reason other than "Hey look. We did a New. Its shit, but we did it anyways". Should have stuck to the old system.
- Keyboard commands not working like "Hold" or "Attack move" which makes at least one mission unnecessarily longer just because you can't attack the mission objective properly. You have to wait for enemy patrols to attack it. In one missions you receive carts with dynamite which you need to blow up rocks to clear a path. Those carts do have a "Explode" command button that doesn't work and you can't attack them to blow them up either.
- Monsters are still as dumb as in D3. Dumber even at times (yes, that is possible). Be it pathing, attack priority in fights, etc. Just overall worse than in Dungeons 3. For example: Your melees start attacking back row enemies when you are still engaged with other melee units which then switch to YOUR back row instead of running after your melees. Same logic for AI and player controlled units. Fail.
- Monster controls in general: Monsters rather attack ANYTHING that has a red health bar than follow a movement order, they stop for half a second if you rapidly give them movement orders (just like in C&C 1, all those DECADES ago), they keep being stuck behind crates, etc.
- The encounters are just ... . In some missions you are starved for resources and barely 15 minutes in you are overrun by champion units that you can't hope to defend against without losing a good part of your army. And because you are resource starved, well good game.
- Leveling up monsters is a pain in the ass and seems random. Some creatures level up naturally as they did in Dungeons 3, some don't seem to. Some seem to receive more Exp than others and you end up with a horde that has a mixture of Level 5 and Level 3 monsters just because.
- Traps are overall worse: Weaker, not all the good traps made it from D3 (mah HEATER T_T)
- Spells are overall worse: Less damage, less shielding, mana cost too high, no charging up
- Doors are worse: You now have to research different door levels to make them viable and even then they are not really good. Too little HP to be any obstacle at all even at highest research level.
- Almost everything is done by Snots now which is OK once your dungeon is more or less finished. Not so good during the building and exploration phase and you are, lets say, trying to pool mana (yes, coming from Snots now) and the Snots are needed explore, farm gold, build rooms, pool mana, man traps (yes, that is a "feature" now) and you only have more Snots once you have higher Dungeon-Tree levels because you receive more of them per tree-level, which costs you more gold that can't be farmed because your Snots are otherwise busy and you still have to pay for your paydays which then again is just more garbage micromanagement, but you also have to level up your Snots to further explore the dungeon for more gold reserves because there are two new stone types which can only be dug out with higher level Snots (and yes. I wrote this as one big sentence, because this is how the ingame progression feels like).
- Evilness is no longer produced passively by Isles. You now have to go out of your way farming it or doing side missions and since some of the prices for later game research are incredibly high, that feels just bad.
- The side missions: for extra evilness and some of them are just bs. Some have you spend hundreds of evilness on an objective to receive ... 50 evilness back. WTF?! Why would I go out of my way then to actually research something that is nice to have, but not necessarily needed, extremely expensive in the process, for 50 resources back? Even 500 would be a stretch.
- Good creatures (the new Isles of evilness I suppose) are strange. Powerful early, reviving stronger, and just not fun. They feel more like necessities then extra encounters. They give you a bunch of evilness for too much time investment early and the amount received is barely enough to research more than 3 early game items and not nearly enough for later researches. Which then loops back to side missions which keep popping up to tell you to kill these things (and their re-incarnations) to then give you a greater amount of evilness. That is just Isles of evilness with extra steps. I'd rather have a passive income than to jump through so many hoops for sometimes quite underwhelming results.
- The new progression system as a whole is one big mess. It is god awful and imo the biggest downgrade of all from the 3rd game. It rarely works in your favor, the upgrades are mostly not worth it, BUT mandatory to either enable more rooms, better abilities for your units, etc. and, of course, keep getting more and more expensive.
The neutral:
-/+ There are new passives from which you can pick 3 at the beginning of a mission and which vastly differ in usefulness. You can give Thalya 100% more experience (which is extremely powerful later in the game) or lower the cost of specific research paths (Horde, Undead, Demon, etc.) by 15%. Some should have been passives in the skill tree though imo. Make you choose between 3 (well actually two since Thalya's is mandatory after activating the Avatar of Evil ) feels unnecessarily like "Here. Have a choice that isn't really one, because we couldn't case less about balancing.".