izigame.me

The Good


The gunplay and the weapon sounds are solid, even the effective range feature feels fitting for a game like this.
It ain't no Tarkov, but gun modding is pretty fun.
Lots of difficulty options, pretty much everything I could think of can be fine tuned to my liking.
Perks can be freely respecced. The only permanent choice you need to make during a run are your faction and the ending reward.
The pixel art is lovely. I especially like the healing animations, a lot being conveyed in very few pixels.
Good variety between the 6 maps. Zakov in particular is huge.
A decent selection of perks. I don't find everything useful, but there's some build variety in there.
Game data and saves are stored in unencoded JSON. Good for modding.


The Bad


The limitations of the top-down view can be really felt here. Positional audio is barely helpful. Range calculation is circular instead of elliptical to compensate for the screen ratio. No character outlines for enemies covered by foreground sprites. It's a coin toss whether a grenade can travel over a piece of cover.
AI's a mixed bag. Sometimes it works admirably, other times it stops reacting to attacks or shot you without a scope from beyond a sniper's range. It either gets scared of their own grenade or pushes right onto it. Enemies can also stack on top of eachother.
Characters produce very little noise, even their speech is text only.
Your line of sight is different from your line of fire. This results in an odd behaviour where you see an enemy but can't fire at them and vice versa.
Melee enemies are way overtuned. They are extremely fast, move irregularly, and deal contact damage. You don't have a melee attack either. They are trivial when noticed ahead of time, but if you find some around a tight corner, you better be holding a shotgun.
Area transitions are handled via teleporting, which NPCs can't use. Works until you find half a dozen blinks on the other side of the door that you can't clear without jumping into the blender. The game even does proper transitions in the bunker, why not anywhere else?
Has the same problem that makes Darkwood unplayable for me, the FOV is just claustrophobically narrow. Fortunately, you can turn it off completely, but that's still giving up a feature.
The UI leaves a lot to be desired. It uses a hard coded CTRL for quick transfer instead of SHIFT, like most other games. This also doubles as a quick equip button, so you can't transfer something that you can equip, even though some perks require to leave equipment slots empty. There are two perk selection screens that serve very similar purposes, yet work completely differently. Gun perks can be replaced individually, character perks have to be reset and reselected completely. There's a permanent tutorial message in the inventory that's rendered on the top layer, blocking the tooltips. Most items don't have descriptions, yet the space for them is reserved in every tooltip. Lootable containers and transitions have to be selected from the same list with the scroll wheel. It's fine until try to run away through a door that's surrounded by bodies. The list can also go offscreen with too many corpses in one spot. Salvaging has to be done one by one with a confirmation dialog that doesn't have a submit hotkey. Modding requires selecting the correct gun from an unorganized list even though there's already a right click menu. A bunch of mods are called the same or something very similar.
Inventory sorting is worthless. It doesn't use name/ID as a secondary column and will just leave items with matching values in some random order. Doesn't combine loose stacks. Price ordering uses the full stack's value, weight ordering uses a single item's weight in the stack. It's also rotates stuff incorrectly and sometimes eats a quest crate. Ain't touching it much anymore.
Quest progression is tied to finding rare key cards at one point. I opened over 700 cabinets and 260 bags by the time I found the required ones and about a hundred more each to get the optional ones as well.
Replacing a hideout module wastes all the resources it cost. Pretty weird considering how lenient it is with perks.
The tutorial not just barely exists, it got worse over time. Now it doesn't even explain the weapon stats.
The protagonist is the kind of person who can't open a door while eating a sandwich. Realistic, but unwelcome.
Cooking's kinda useless. There's already very few food items that's worth their weight and you can't make any of them. There aren't even any level 2 recipes.
Terrain generation still has its hiccups that prevents you from accessing certain areas.
The plot might as well just not be there. It's primarily delivered through textual lore dumps, moved forward by a lot of lucky guesses, and doesn't provide a conclusion that I would find meaningful in any way. You get even less of an ending on permadeath. And for the faction war side questline you get nothing at all, no dialogue or even a You're Winner popup.
Some items are balanced quite weirdly. Scrapping results are based on value, not weight. FN weapons are exclusive to the slavic faction. Gold necklaces and watches weigh over a kilo. The citizens of Zarkov must be in on Goku's training method, eh?


The Ugly


Despite going 1.0, it's really unpolished and buggy. A texture creation error dialogs pop up every now and then. Current XP sometimes reset on level up, sometimes carries over. Your drop off point isn't spawn protected. In Zakov sightlines and enemies sometimes just pop in. Stock guns come with incompatible mods. The secret perk messes with respeccing. Unloading ammo or scrapping will put the results on top of other items. Scrapping certain items one by one is more efficient than in a stack. Dialogue, loading screen hints, and the UI still uses cut or unimplemented features, like the doctor giving tasks, skill specializations, bandit rep, or inventory portraits. Valentin's kill and airdrop stats are not recorded. Some magazine counts are wrong. Weight calculation can't handle scrapping. Modding allows long handguards on short barrels without compensating for muzzle devices. Some walls have no collision. Two injectors use the same sprite, even though there's a separate one in the game files already. Water tiling sometimes just gives up. Capitalization rules are decided by rolling dice. Save file's might be getting bloated with dead data, didn't get a confirmation on that. The list goes on and some of these were around for like a year before 1.0. Most of these aren't insufferable, but the whole just gives off a really jank and poorly tested vibe.
For some reason it starts in exclusive fullscreen mode then goes to borderless when you tab out for the first time. Messes up my windows every time. And the windowed mode has a bug where cursor continuously climbs upwards, making it unusable.
Whenever you deploy to a hunt, it'll save your character already naked. Sure, it prevents save scumming but also applies when the game just crashes, which still happens from time to time. In a single player game where death drops are already a choice, this is just throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The backups are also worthless, all 5 of them get overwritten at almost the same time.


TL;DR

It's game I like a lot, but just can't bring myself to recommend. The fun I had with it rides on the back of learning to look past its rough edges during the early access period, where this state was acceptable. But if I picked it up today as a finished product, I probably would refund it. Fortunately, development's still ongoing, and while I doubt the core design issues will be addressed, some of the jank might get cleaned up to make it a bit more recommendable.