izigame.me

The game showed some promise as a procedurally generated detective game in early access, allowing you to use a caseboard and link entities together and a noir movie atmosphere.
Unfortunately, the promise it showed on paper did not live up to the quality of the product on offer in early access. With the devs rushing this one out of early access in a very blatently unfinished state, it will be hard for me to recommend this title to anyone.
Will devs continue supporting this product after launch? are they rushing this out of EA because they're broke? Who knows, but at this point, judging by the update frequency, the quality of the updates and the ability to take feedback into consideration and tackle issues, i would strongly doubt that this product will eventually become successful.
Here is a non exhaustive selection of some very significant cons that you should know before you buy:
- Rather poor technical performance. Even on a very high-end PC, the performance is not acceptable. It's choppy, stutters, features visual bugs, the occasional out of bonds falling and audio mixing issues. Does not crash on me too hard, but that's about how far as i'll go praising the tech side.
- Extremely shallow game mechanics: the game tries to feature some housing game loop and customization, but it's not feature complete, as in you can have a house but there even isn't a point to having one. There's a food/drink game loop but it's so shallow, they could rename all the types of food to a placeholder "FOOD" and it would effectively be the same.
- Poor selection of criminal case types. It's not varied enough, there are only a few, and the way you solve them never changes. Thus, the game itself has so little to offer in its core premise.
- Over usage of procedural AI dialogue that sees you having moon logic convos with NPCS, huge missed opportunity there.
- The balancing/loot settings makes no sense. You make more money robbing people blind at 0 risk and with no limit, than you do working as an actual detective.
- No point or sense to anything that happens in game / No overarching plot. People kill people, their motivation is not consistent with their situation as an NPC in their world, everybody cheats on their partner (not kidding) and everybody has medical issues, and none of it matters. None of what the NPCs live, like and do matter. You solve cases based upon a standard template that is entirely independent of the NPCs. Makes solving cases even more of a dumb menial task.
- Side detective jobs are entirely miscalibrated when it comes to the parameters of intelligence that the NPCs give you. You will absolutely be contracted by an NPC to investigate their partner that they suspect is cheating on them. But they will absolutely only give you their Blood type and shoe size. Go have fun. Such ludicrous situations will be commonplace in the game.
- You will realize that ultimately any and all investigative work will be trivialized by the existence of the police database, and that if you spend a few minutes printing out NPC profiles from this data base, the game will from then on consider that you have intimate knowledge of those people and allow you to immediately solve all future cases because you have intimate knowledge of the entire world.
- The visual fidelity of the game just does not work for me. While a subjective point, i think you will find that it's not just a matter of preference. There will be cases where the low visual fidelity will prevent you from actually making out script that is important for you to be able to read. e.g: writings on the wall/floor/pavement in the victims blood. I am not even going to mention that some of these will inevitably be cut off by a piece of furniture in front of it or by a prop on the street that obstructs your view because the game is just that raw. It's not just the scripts that are difficult to read. Recognizing NPCs, their core features in game and on the case board is just about impossible. The game aesthetics work i think, but the NPCs just don't and could use a complete visual overhaul.
I could go on for a long while on all the missed opportunities, all the failings of this game, but i thought i would focus on what is bugging me the most right now after following this for all early access, and hopefully prevent some people with limited income from making a purchase they will likely regret.
This review will be updated and modified accordingly if the launch build unexpectedly solves a good portion of those issues or later down the line if this eventually becomes decent. But right now i could not recommend.
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Launch day edit:
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After having sunk some more hours on the launch day build, and given the 1.0 patchnotes, this review sadly will remain negative.
On the technical side of things, this is the same performances as during EA. You will have to have a beefy computer to have a decent FPS, but even then you *will* experience unstable FPS, graphical glitches, physics/collision bugs, heavy stutters, and performance drops in many areas. No improvement whatsoever from my previous EA experience.
The lighting propagation/consistency is abysmal. It was something i hoped for them to address eventually but i guess this isn't going to be in the cards given the dev's recent statement that they are satisfied with what is in the game content wise and all that is left for them is to tackle some bug squashing.
On the content side of things, very little has changed with the release patch which by the way was only 64.2 mb. A new side job content, the kidnappings.
But by and large this has the exact same failings as the EA did. For a detective game to not have any focus on motive and opportunity is rather unacceptable. The above remarks on the game remain true.
Bonus points for the NPC AI making even less sense in this release build than it did during early access, with people getting stuck in inane loops of opening and closing their appartments doors, getting to bed to sleep, to wake up unprompted 15 seconds later, to open a door, close it again, then go back to bed, on repeat.
Sorry to say, this game is not fit for purpose and while you may enjoy it for a few hours depending on your expectations, the fun wears off rather quickly, and the amount of jenk is staggering. I know i won't be engaging with products from this developper/publisher in the future.