This was a perfectly fine metroidvania game. Some really good music and good level design, but I felt like most of it was trying to imitate something else instead of being its own thing. Still, I had fun.

There's also, like, no reason to have that many weapons in a metroidvania.

(BacklogBeat’s Game Club - March 2021 Nomination)

Physically hurt to play. You can do a korean input for air dashes on keyboard once you unlock them by buffering a horizontal key and dp'ing orthodox or inverse. Gameplay gimmicks get really good in the 2nd half, pacing is alright if you don't get lost, you never lose any significant amount of progress and there are cheat codes, speedrun and randomizer modes for further replayability.

Picked back up from my backlog and i still think it has some serious issues but i beat it in one sitting, not without some hand cramps by the end. Super slow start but worth it around the time you get the grapple hook.

This is a game I really wanted to like, but for some reason it never clicked with me.

Axiom Verge's best is in its graphics and NES inspired atmosphere. There is some really great pixel art here, expecially in the bigger beings, so the bosses and the big machine lady thing (she kinda bad tho ngl): I really liked the cutscens too. Not all the areas had the same quality in the design and atmosphere department, with certain much more inspired than others. The music can go from generic to wack, but the general quality is at the very least decent.
It's a solid metroidvania, with some interesting ideas for power ups and weapons, but a lot of them are very situational, so I generally used the same two or three, even though I unlocked most of them. I'm not the biggest fan of the level design, and the enemy placement often feels very annoying, but I don't know how much this was influenced by the fact that i was playing on hard. I'm not a fan of the enemy design either and a lot of them felt like they were there just to annoy moreso than giving you a challenge. Before beating the last boss I wanted to renavigate the whole map to see what i had missed, but traversal is a slog even though there is some kind of fast travel ( a better one would have been very much appreciated), so I just gave up. As far as difficulty goes, it isn't easy, but most of the challenges I had were with normal enemies and my lack of patience (the last boss is tough too).
The core gameplay isn't bad at all, and I also liked the little story beats, but too often going forward it felt more like work than pleasure, expecially in the first and last part of the game. It's a shame I didn't really enjoyed it but I'm sure Axiom Verge has an heart, and will be appreciated by a lot if people.

Un metroidvania de cuando querían parecerse a Metroid, y no ser una copia más sin alma de Hollow Knight (porque no había salido aún, tho).
Tiene un pico de dificultad en la última zona bastante absurdo y hay muchos caminos que están bloqueados por un upgrade (lo típico, vaya), pero cuando pasas esa barrera, hay otra más en la que necesitas otro objeto más. Normalmente eso lleva a mejoras opcionales, pero frustra un poco ver que has desbloqueado un camino nuevo para encontrarte con otro callejón sin salida.
Por el resto, el pixelart es muy bueno, la música y el argumento muy ochentero, etc. Muy guapo.

Axiom Verge is a title I had been curious about for quite some time, in fact I've owned the game for several years at this point but for some reason never decided to pick it up and play it.

There was something intriguing about the grim artstyle the game was going for, as well as its blatant homage to the Metroid franchise. Then there was the fact that it was developed by a single person, one Thomas Happ, which maximized my interest because games developed by a single person tend to show a lot of their vision and personality through the work.

To summarize Axiom Verge though, I can only say this:

It is aggressively ok.

What I mean by this is that the game never truly gets to be genuinely interesting especially considering its genre.

Your movement options are extremely limited, with not many upgrades that change that.

Level design is very inspired by Metroid, and by Metroid I mean the 1986 NES game, which if you don't remember, had a lot of samey looking locations with copy/paste level design. A lot of areas can feel very familiar, especially the vertical shafts, and this game loves its shafts.

It very much feels more like a derivative of Metroid rather than its own experience at points, and these things kind of kill what could be a stellar game because there are ideas I genuinely enjoy about it.

The glitching mechanics are a unique way of traversing the environment and dealing with enemies. You can glitch through walls to progress into hidden areas, or use your gun to glitch enemies causing different effects depending on the enemy themselves.

You can have an enemy glitch and they'll constantly shoot health at you, or you can have them glitch and fly away. Of course, the variety eventually gets limited as some enemies just do the same thing as others, but the idea is fun in practice.

Then there's the sheer number of weapons you can acquire from a typical blaster to a shotgun like electric shock to a bomb to a flamethrower, the variety is impressive. However, I didn't feel much of a need to experiment because a lot of the guns also feel situational and on top of that... they're not really used for puzzles and the like.

For most of the game I stuck with the Electric Shotgun because it does a fuck ton of damage to pretty much all regular enemies, and until I got the other Electric Gun that tracks enemies down it was my go to weapon.

Not to say all the weapons are bad and I'm sure you can do all sorts of things with them, but for me I will pick what works best.

I also dig how the password system is used to solve puzzles though some puzzles and shit are hidden behind notes you have to collect and its a bit tedious.

I don't think the game should be as disliked as it is but in the same vein, it's just not a very interesting time. This is a game you play once and then never again because why play this over AM2R, Super Metroid, Symphony of the Night, etc.

I will forever remained impressed by Thomas Happ singlehandedly developing everything for this game, but yeah, it's a pump and dump Metroidvania.

Also the story is ok, I don't think there's really much to talk about other than I liked some of the twists.

Es muy divertido y la música al igual que la atmosfera que crea junto con su historia son espectaculares.

Lo malo o no tan bueno:
El movimiento por el mapa es medio agobiante llegados al final (no hay fast travel), lo complicado de los bosses es encontrar un ángulo a su punto débil más que la coreografía de la pelea, las muertes no son penalizadas, muchas de las armas son irrelevantes y hubo veces que no sabía dónde tenía que ir exactamente.

Más allá de cualquier comentario negativo Axiom Verge sigue siendo un juego muy bueno y que marcó el año de su salida. Lo super recomiendo si se quiere jugar a un Metroid moderno o metroidvania muy competente.

i'm going to be making a ton of comparisons to metroid in this review because i feel like that's what this game was really trying to go for.

it took me three tries over four(?) years to finish this game and it really never felt worth it. the game excels at atmosphere but i can't say much positively about the rest.

there's a reason the metroid series' (and plenty other metroidvanias') soundtracks are mostly ambient. for one they invoke more density into the atmosphere and they're undistracting backdrops for long exploration. a lot of this game's soundtrack is beat-driven synthwave-esque dance music with chiptune inserted for retro flare and it is legitimately maddening at moments which brings me to my next point: axiom verge's sense of direction.

metroid is very guilty in making you backtrack long distances with newly acquired powerups to advance through locations you previously couldn't. it also isn't the worst thing ever since traversal and movement in metroid games are pretty satisfying and are full of additional pathways for you to dip your toes in with your new powers before you reach your destination. axiom verge suffers at its worst for failing to realize what makes metroid's backtracking and platforming worthwhile. most of your backtrack treks will be single-pathed (at least most of them will until maybe 75% through the main story) and LONG, but the worst offender is that you might not even come across the hints of where you might need to come back to. i'm personally very conservative about checking guides because i love the feeling of discovering things on my own but i have never checked a guide in any game more often than this one and never have i felt so stupefied at where i actually had to go and what action i specifically had to perform. routes aren't cryptic for the sake of leaving you to experiment, they're cryptic because of bad design, and with this i'll return to my first point: the soundtrack. i'm aware of the developer's lack of experience in music composition so i apologize... you do not want to hear this mediocre, occasionally bombastic synthwave chiptune music for the hours you (or i) will spend trial-and-erroring every potential dead-end and suspicious tile.

the game's best saving grace is its atmosphere. this game takes metroid's underlying horror aspects and doubles down on it in many locations: bug-infested corridors, massive death-machine warriors with insect-like bodies with their life support systems organically wound through its surrounding environment, towering piles of corpses and secret chambers where reality disconnects and "glitches". this game is full of harrowing and inventive world concepts that i wish were a bit more fleshed out from its confusing story and vague, almost-useless(?) notes scattered across the world. this game has an intriguing world with an odd lack of world-building.

i didn't completely hate my experience with axiom verge but it was definitely a slog to get from start to finish, even after 2 previous attempts. i'm glad i did finish it because i do believe the upcoming sequel has EVERY opportunity to rectify these issues, because maybe more wiggle room is what this game really needed.

This is a neat metroidvania that is surprisingly only made by one person. I found the exploration to be fun, but I wish the movement was a little faster as it can feel like a slog to get around sometimes. There were also a few points where it got rather confusing what was a platform and what was just decoration, but it didn't hinder my experience that much. I enjoyed the enemy variety and how unique they were, even if a few were annoying to fight. The big assortment of guns is also cool, but I would've greatly preferred more unique upgrades instead. Speaking of guns, they (along with some optional upgrades) were usually hidden in great spots, but there is a good amount of them that I feel were really cryptic, which can be frustrating for a metroidvania. Despite the many flaws, I did enjoy most of my time with this game, and I'm interesting in trying the recently released sequel down the line, which I'm hoping solves some of my problems with this game.

An impressive effort for a single dev, Axiom Verge has a great pixelart style and banging music, and an interesting glitch mechanic that is integrated into the plot.

Unfortunately, the actual moment-to-moment gameplay can be kinda plodding. The level design lacks the tightness of something like Metroid and feels kinda sprawling, with a fair amount of backtracking killing the pace at times. Several of the bosses are interesting set pieces, but the boss fights tend to range from being uninteresting to downright annoying. The bullet-hell boss near the end is absolutely awful.

That said, the glitch mechanic is conceptually interesting and corrupting enemies produces a variety of effects. The whole 'minus world' thing is cool as well. Sadly, a lot of the glitch mechanic just ends up being fairly standard Metroidvania progression fare, glitched blocks or patches blocking off exploration until you have the right tool to deal with them.

And that's sorta the problem with Axiom Verge. It has a lot of interesting ideas, but in practice never really rises above a formulaic, merely acceptable execution of them. It's not a bad game by any means, it's just not particularly exciting, and perhaps could benefit from a more collaborative effort where other people could lend their expertise to Tom Happ's ideas. Of course, maybe the sequel improves on this - I don't know, because I haven't played it yet.

I will say, though, that even though I have no intention of using them as the base game didn't interest me enough to want to play it again, the in-game addition of Speedrun and Randomiser modes is pretty cool and I wish more games did this.

Wife’s Reaction:
“Items collected at 69%? Nice.”

Guns. Lots of Guns:
My first feelings with Axiom Verge were very positive. An old-school game that evokes the feelings of classic Metroid? Exactly what I wanted. But it never felt like the adventure evolved. There are way too many guns and some of the traversal abilities are odd. In the end, I felt like it was just fine.

Axiom Verge is a rare game that really made me feel like I was exploring a strange alien planet instead of just playing a video game. I really enjoyed the peudo hacking mechanics that added a surreal touch to the world and the many of the guns you get are a lot of fun to play around with. One of the most standout features though is the vagueness in a lot of the characters actions and motivations, which really makes you question who are the good guys and the bad guys, especially with the end credits scene.

I deeply love the metroidvania genre. In particular, I've always had a preference to the less-castylevania games as well, finding faster movement, deeper verticality, non-architectural level design, and gun/projectile based gameplays more fun.

This is likely the only real exception I've encountered. The style and premise are right up my alley, beautiful pixel graphics and a fun existential scifi plot in what I dare to describe as a near-Gigeresque world.

And yet. It jut doesn't click for me. I found the gameplay loop of the gun switches to be clumsy, the drill was entirely unnecessary and could have been wrapped in with the scanner, the scanner also being pretty unfun and unwieldy to use. The game doubles down on one of if not the worst tropes of the Metroidvania genre, hitting every single tile of every single room. Pair this with what felt like pretty uninspired level layout, it just seemed so much more damning than pleasant.

I truly want to like this game, every part of my being says I should and that's why I keep going back to try it again thinking "maybe this time it'll happen" and it never does, and I have plenty of real marked complaints about the game but at the end of the day I don't think it's some awful game.

It's just not for me. It's probably not life changing amazing, maybe it's not even great, but it's not bad either. Give it a try if this genre is your thing, otherwise, maybe steer clear.