Review | Intrepid Izzy

Intrepid Izzy promotes itself as a “love letter to the Dreamcast”.  I don’t know what this means, exactly.  In my 4 hours with the game, I found a highly colorful, bland, repetitive action platformer that somehow managed to overstay its welcome in that short period of time.  There are some neat ideas here and occasionally funny writing that may make it worth a younger audience’s while though, so let’s get into it.

Press X to Win

Intrepid Izzy’s story setup is as light as it gets.  A fuchsia-haired woman finds a lamp and lets out a bad genie.  She’ll chase him across areas like “Aztec Greece” and “Chocolate Mine” while wearing different power-bestowing outfits and beating up a lot of plants. This is Ratalaika’s latest and if you know anything about the publisher then you’ll understand the scope of this title.  It isn’t large, though the music is far better than it has any right to be.  The story never made much sense and was just more of a backdrop for the action platforming. 

Controls are basic with X as your main attack. This can turn into an uppercut when you hold up and does basic auto combos on enemies that stunlock them in place. Combat is mediocre, bland, and extremely repetitive throughout.  To complement your mindless mashing is a clothing-specific special move on the Y button.  To start with you’ll have a Hadouken fireball, she even yells that out every time you attack. Other abilities are a wind Hadouken and butt stomp when you’re dressed like a squirrel and a stick of dynamite when you put a miner’s outfit on. Each area is large with multiple branching paths only able to be reached through different costumes, which you can change in town.  I wish you could have changed things up without having to travel back so often as it hurt the pacing of the game even with the availability of a few teleporting mirrors mixed in throughout each level.

A is your jump button and jumping is the best feeling part of the game.  It’s not perfect but depending on how long you press the button you can easily control your jump height and you have just enough air control to make platforming a breeze.  Other than that there isn’t much to the game besides a basic and bland UI that is a chore to navigate through.  Getting into and out of the map system requires you to back out of and scroll down the map itself instead of allowing you quick access through the view button as most modern games do.  The game combines a checkpoint and save system to maximize frustration as you have to find the weird mole rat who thinks Izzy smells nice if you want to save and finish a play session. Health works on a three-point system that can be replenished by finding random food throughout the levels. There are heart pieces to find as well, and every four of them can be exchanged for an extra heart for your health pool.

Dreamcast?

The constant mentioning of the Sega Dreamcast in the game’s marketing made sense once I found out that they actually made a physical version of this game for it last year, neat! The game looks fine, with decent animations in the small selection of enemy types.  Human characters look odd and I wouldn’t be shocked if their faces were pulled from either the dev or Kickstarter backers.  There is a town in game that lets you visit a local arcade and play basic arcade titles as well as get food/magic recovery items for when you’re on a run.  I think it looks nice overall for the budget though I did get a lot of ghosting on my monitor.

The music is the game’s best part and it’s a mix of jaunty tunes unique to each of the main areas. It comes courtesy of Ben Kurotoshiro and is a bright spot in an otherwise mediocre affair. Izzy’s grunts, groans, and yells of Hadouken are rather muted and the only voice acting I heard in my time playing.  Bug-wise I didn’t run into anything at all. It was a solid experience which was nice to see as releases lately have mostly been anything but.

In Conclusion

Intrepid Izzy takes aim at both those nostalgic for games of 30 years ago and a younger crowd.  It’s not that long and no part of it is truly terrible. If you’re in the mood for a light and easy action platformer then this one might be up your alley.

Intrepid Izzy

$18.99

5

Okay

5.0/10

Pros

• Looks Nice
• Good Music
• Decent Platforming

Cons

• Bad Combat
• Lots of Wasted Travelling Time
• Checkpoint/Save System

See on the Xbox Store