izigame.me

Overview:

This game is fun for the first two hours, then the novelty immediately wears off.
Modes:
Main Story
The campaign is repetitive - go to this location, kill enemies here, rinse and repeat with barely any changes to gameplay flow or enemy roster. They introduce a couple new weapons in the first levels but other than that it's the same thing. Literally - they recycle the same stage boss 5 or 6 times at LEAST (Did the developers take inspiration from Halo 5 Guardian?).
Overall, the campaign is rather short, so it ends just as things start to get really annoyingly repetitive.
As for the story itself - well, it's an interesting jab at the classical religious portrayal of Heaven and Hell, it's more or less a diet coke version of DOOM Eternal's implementation.
You play as a female demon who lost her voice and is in a relentless uphill battle against overwhelming odds to reclaim it. Along the way, you meet Paz, your sidekick and the narrative voice of reason throughout your quest who has a southern cowboy accent.
The judge is the keeper of Hell(s) and upon killing her you break through the barrier between Hell, Reality (Earth) and Heaven.
Leviathan:
Ugh, where do I even begin with this mess of a mode? Remember when I said the main story got repetitive and that was it's biggest flaw? Well, if you touch this mode you'll think the story is x10 times more fun.
Why, you may ask? Simple.
You are stripped of ALL your abilities. Let me rephrase - ALL.
That means no primary or secondary weapons - you only have your starter weapons: the borderline useless skull and your blade (which here, most enemies will be ranged ones and most encounters will drain you of your health and considering how scarce health is, that is NOT a viable option to get into the later stages).
You have no DASH and your movement speed is severely impacted to make traversing the tiny-ass maps slower in order to not make you immediately notice how minuscule these set-pieces are.
And to add insult to injury, you cannot perform glory kills to gain health back, you're essentially reliant on the crystal health drops but once those are gone, you're boned.
The only things to help you long term are upgrading your health upgrades. (One increases Max HP, others increase crystal spawns which doesn't honestly help all that much and there is one perk that allows you to regen health when standing still, however it is painfully slow and borderline useless since you cannot regen between rounds either.
With this in mind, enemies that you would mop the floor with such as the acid flies now are complete game-enders 'cause if you get caught in the acid you're slowed down even more (if you don't pick the upgrade at the Altar which I'll get into in a second).
The Altar: Okay so this is your typical horde/survival mode vendor/shop in between waves. You charge up the altar by killing enemies and once the meter is full it sends out a wave that kills any remaining enemies.
The Altar will randomly give you a selection of 3 perks (4 if you have the upgrade).
(These can be an increase to your damage, damage absorption, another weapon, or misc perks that make enemies bleed or explode)
You can only pick one perk per round.
So yeah, Leviathan is an unfair pile of garbage EVEN with a all of the upgrades.
Speaking of upgrades:...
You can collect Void Coins in order to upgrade your abilities to make Leviathan mode even barely remotely fair.
You have questionably complex skill trees for a game like this and you can upgrade either your health, weapons, abilities, etc.
Considering you're spending loads of points on for example upgrading your revolvers, you'd expect the game to allow you to keep them permanently after maxing them out, but no, you're given one more wave to keep them before they expire (alongside damage and fury bonuses).
There are only a handful of actually useful upgrades such as increasing your max health, adding back dash from the start (it should have been there to begin with, but I digress), enabling your ultimate or even increasing the amount of perks you can choose from from 3 to 4.
Most upgrades are very pricey considering that you have to painful sit through and grind through with barely anything at the beginning. (for instance most upgrades are at min 20 points, max 150 pts and around 30-50 per average, finishing about 8 waves will get you 20 void coins to upgrade so it will take a VERY long time).
To make matters more interesting you are capped at a max of 3000 points allocated total - this means you CANNOT exceed this range with your upgrades, so if you somehow manage to get a lot of points and are thinking of unlocking all the upgrades, no dice - you have to create a build and go with it.
I respect the dedication to make such an intricate system, however if it is rigged against the player to this degree with such an abrupt curve in progression then there is absolutely no incentive to play the game to progress. At the end of the day, this is just a rhythm-based first person shooter.
Loadout
The game allows you to set up your loadout, which is only really useful in Story Mode since in Leviathan you're starting more or less bare-handed.
You can change your outfit or weapons (The game has about 8 weapons)

Useless-ass Skull (it shoots fireballs)
Blade
Shotgun (slow, but pretty meaty)
Dual Revolvers (really fun)
Crossbow (that has AOE, probably one of the best weapons in the game)
Throwable Dual Blade Staffs (pretty slow and eh)
Gatling Gun (its alright, but literally using the revolvers/crossbow is the meta)
DLC Bow

Conclusions:
I got this game while it was on sale, however after an unsatisfying short and repetitive campaign and a horrible horde mode, I still feel robbed of $10.
The concept of the game is solid, the gameplay is there, it just needs way more thought put behind it and a lot more refining. The developers have the soul for their game but somehow dropped the ball and implemented so many questionable design decisions that stained that great first impression I have and left me with a bitter taste.
The only pros I can think of is that the DLC contains songs from Disturbed, Gorillaz (Don't ask me how or why) and Muse.
Purchase when on sale, otherwise don't bother, it is not worth your time unless it is patched sometime in the future.