izigame.me

This post is not a review in the traditional sense, instead it is a historical review, a timeline of the game so to say. There are certain notable trends when it comes to the games' development and you should be able to spot them by reading this review.
Prepare for a bit of boredom
****For the current update jump down to the bottom.
our story begins on May 17. 2023, when the game launched it quickly gained a lot of traction and while a lot of the game was still very basic, there were only about 6-8 weapons in the game total split between 3 classes. The game was fun* and it was also the most stable it has ever been since. The strong interest in the game caused multiple groups to pick up the game and led to the foundation of multiple organized communities that still exist nowadays. In may, ST:E had it's highest playercount peak, with about 16 thousand players, a number that made the servers rattle somewhat but the game was still very much playable.
In june we got our first big update titled mutated sands. There were some minor weapon tweaks and we got a manned twin-mg emplacement, even better they unlocked a new part of the valaka map and it was a blast*. The mutators were a bit wonky, which made sense considering the wide variety but it added a lot of the game. Combinations like lowered gravity, threat level maximum and explosive maces kept players busy across all difficulty levels. This was good as most "veteran" players had already mastered higher difficulties so adding mutators helped to keep the players who had waited for an update for more than a month interested. Additionally, this would be the beginning of an unusual* behaviour that the developer would keep up. The update was announced 1 day before it went live, from here on out I will call this a Blitz-patch. It should be noted that adding the mutators made the game a slight bit more unstable and introduced a few new bugs (not enemies), which made the game more difficult to play for some players.
7 days after the patch they changed a few things, removing a lot of mutators from higher difficulties, reducing the variety substantially but also fixing quite a few issues like grenades not exploding etc.
Another month passed and horde mode was announced, now most players* were expecting a mode that would make you defend a position against the bugs with the waves getting harder and harder until your position would finally break. Well it was not that. Instead horde mode made you hold out against 10 waves of hordes in which you had to kill a certain number of bugs, doing so would end the wave and allow you to build more structures. While this patch was not a Blitz-patch, being announced almost a week before it dropped (on august 2.) it wasn't just good stuff*. The patch reverted a lot of the fixes that the last patch had brought, causing the same bugs to appear again that players were hoping they'd never have to deal with again. Hi-ex grenades once more didn't explode and while horde mode initially posed a challenge it was soon to be forgotten again* as the gamemode didn't turn out to be too interesting. It should also be mentioned that the playerbase had begun to shrink decisively, and it was down to about 3k from the original 16k. Horde mode was followed by multiple smalled patches that intended to help with the lower player numbers.
October was the month that they announced the next update and a substantial change to the game. The game that was previously created in Unreal 4 was to switch to Unreal 5, additionally new gear and a new gamemode (a 4 player-mode as opposed to the regular 16 player modes) was introduced.
Well to keep it short Unreal 5 made the game unstable* and buggy* as hell for most players. The Hive-Hunt mode wasn't necessarily balanced and neither was the new gear, leading to a new method to play the game (ab)*using the new speed-stims to outrun any enemy and completing hive hunts without killing a single bug. It has to be said that they fixed hive-hunt a while afterwards and that they nerfed speed-stims later on but it should also be said that the new huge stability issues most likely being caused by the devs switching to UE5* were not fixed. From here on out the new engine would continue causing troubles for some players with most patches.
The next update would drop in december, and added an entirely new map to the game. Agni prime was a lava-filled hellhole, and while the map looked cool it also looked and felt unfinished* due to weird textures, and obvious texture mismatches and stretching in areas where different map segments connected in addition to taking lava damage in areas where there were no lava textures on the ground. Agni didn't just pose a challenge for the players but also for the players hardware. The new texture and particle effects ridden map excluded even more players from playing and fought an active war against the FPS of the players devices. Peak player numbers fell to 950 in november but doubled again in december. Agni also featured a new bug called the inferno, which rained down even more particle effects on players.
It was also december when they announced all class progression (all the exp) would be wiped somewhere in the new year. They also had a double exp event to celebrate the holidays, which felt a bit weird*.
Somewhere between december and january they also made a tweak to the spawn locations for the primary objectives, drastically reducing where they could spawn, resulting in an extreme reduction of game variety on all maps. Depending on the map players were now able to predict where the primary objective would spawn (because they always spawned in the same spots on certain maps after the tweak).
In january they released an optimization patch that helped alleviate some but definitely not all of the performance issues of the game. Many more players were able to play the game again without lagging as hard but the game was still bug-ridden (again, not the enemies). It was frankly, a drop in the bucket*.
In april they released the newest patch, adding new classes to the game, new gear, a new respawn-ticket system And while I am currently still optimistic and ignoring quite a few balancing issues the new patch once more introduced more bugs (not the enemies, but also a new enemy) making the game once more unplayable for a lot of people. They also had to add warrior ambush to everything because of the body limit bug (so we would still get some bugs sometimes)
****
It's time for the release update to this review.
The review fixed a lot of issues, and also broke a lot of things, and also introduced new features that were broken. I have to keep this brief because a review can only have so many symbols. First, bugs spawn unhindered again (no body limit bug again). They introduced a new planet and it works mostly, by which i mean that it works but the new boss bug they introduced falls through the map on it (they removed it for a while to fix it, it's unclear if it works on the new map now). They also introduced a guild system that needed to be used to access the new planet, sadly they released it without a search function (they added one later), and a banned word list including the word extermination (so you couldn't make that part of your guild name or message, they also fixed that now). We have frequent crashes now, during and after the game as well as ping disconnects happening if someones ping spikes for 3s. And last but not least we have bug spawn issues meaning that exterminations spawn too slow (so you can't finish them in the time limit) and sometimes during the arc slam barely any bugs spawn meaning you can hang back, mix and drink a cocktail while the arc stands unmolested. Future updates will be in the comment section.
I love this game but it's not very easy to love. Devs, please move slower with major features and make sure to only release stable builds. Disconnects every 4-6 games are not a good thing.