Iconoclasts starts off as a good looking action-puzzle platformer with some interesting mechanics (pun intended). After more than 12 hours of playing, only the good looking part really remains with a clear positive rating. The story? A mess that starts out interesting but from the middle point on starts losing itself in overboardingly absurd scenes. The characters? Horrible, all of them. There is not a single likeable character in the game. Everyone is either a complete idiot, full "lawful stupid" paladin, self-centered ***hat or sheepish coward - and barely any of their actions make any sense. Worst of all is the main protagonist, Robin, who mains entirely character-/face- and emotionless throughout the entire game. But maybe that is a good thing, given how bad all the other characters are... The controls? Okay, but could be MUCH better. It is unnecessarily difficult to pull some basic platformer movement off. The writing? Starts off strange - every dialogue just feels off, as if something was lost in translation. And maybe it was. All I can say is that it gets worse. By the end of the game, everyone is rambling such utter nonsense that I found myself skipping through entire dialogues just be done with it. The gameplay? Full with arbitrarily self-breaking rules and absurd frustrations. I won't list all of them, as there are just too many. But have my favourite: 1) Everything in the game is roughly box-sized. You can crawl through one-box-sized tunnels on the ground. You can grab the ledge of 2,3,4+ boxes-high ledges and pull yourself up, also into a one-box-sized tunnel. But a ledge that is only one-box-high with a one-box-sized tunnel above it? Impossible. You are standing right in front of it and everyone could climb in with ease. But not our main character. Fear the one-box-high tunnel. Ridiculous. All in all, avoid this. Spare yourself the disappointment.
While FTL had some randomness, too, it was mostly a game of attrition and planning ahead. You could always do a comeback later if you found some good stuff. Into The Breach on the other hand will just randomly serve you missions that are impossible do perfectly (if you cannot do all missions perfectly on the first two islands, you might as well give up on longer runs). I lost count for the amount of times I was forced to restart the game from scratch, just because I got served a mission and/or round that would make it impossible to fulfill the missions goals or cost far too much grid.
I can only say that, yes, this game was released far too soon. But the developer(s) really care and are busy patching since it was released. Up to this point, five patches have been released and only few heavy bugs remain. I can only encourage everyone to buy this game and play it. This really is a great game, and with the bugs out of the way, you can really see it.
