Maximum Axiom Verge Urge

[Gottfrid]

You should have a new traversal mechanic with some obvious places to use it back in Kur. You should find some help there.

 

Yes, I found it shortly after.

 

Really enjoyed the feeling of getting lost though. After playing through Guacamelee last week (which was nothing but a hunt for question marks on the map), Axiom Verge feels like a salvation in that regard.

[Sno]

So i love Axiom Verge, and to make a comparison to another nostalgia-evoking game, i think that when it's right on point, it's awesome in all the ways i think Shovel Knight was awesome. (It generally understands what makes the things its pulling from work and is able to extrapolate out on those assumptions in interesting new ways while also playing up some nostalgic vibes.)

 

I don't love it as much as Shovel Knight, though.

 

The boss fights really need to be pointed out first of all, because they suck. They're terrible boss fights. They're big and flashy, but they're built around extremely basic loops with no curve balls to push you to adapt. If you can defeat a boss by standing in one spot shooting and only occasionally jumping, it's a bad boss, and that's almost every boss in that game. These bosses are clearly inspired by Super Metroid's bosses, but those bosses get the curve balls right, the odd tracking projectiles that fly at you from weird angles and push you to keep repositioning yourself during the fight. I mean, but even as simple as these fights are, i wouldn't complain about them if they weren't such colossal damage sponges. There's no excuse for such simple boss fights being dragged out for so long.

 

I think a lot of the weapons are super redundant, it feels like they could have been collapsed into maybe 3 or 4 archetypes with stacking upgrades or something.

 

I have some doubts about how well the progression through the game world flows, but i've been back and forth in random wanderings so much in this playthrough that i have no concept of how everything fits together. I feel like i'd need to do a second run before i could make any real judgements about how well designed the world is. If nothing else though, it's an appealingly enormous world with a ton of stuff to do, it's quite a massive game as metroidvanias go.

 

I think the game has some pretty brilliant traversal mechanics and i think that is where this game succeeds the most, it's hard to take a formula as well worn as a metroidvania and have some relatively unique spins on it.

 

Oh my god that soundtrack is amazing.

 

I generally love the visual aesthetic, the bizarre giger-esque environments and the way some more modern particle and pixel shader effects are layered onto an otherwise consistent retro aesthetic somehow without feeling incongruous, the game looks super nice. I wish the camera didn't zoom out for boss fights though, it sort of ruins the look the game is going for.

 

The "secret worlds" made me laugh, those are wonderful. That's quite an inventive nod to Metroid.

[GavinTheAlmighty]

I just finished AV last night.  I played it over the course of about three days - I just absorbed this game in my life like a sponge.  It was excellent - definitely a lot of fun, but I do have some criticisms, most of which have been mentioned in this thread already.

 

There are WAY too many weapons, and yeah, you barely use the majority of them.  I picked up 10 of them and felt that that was too many.  Apparently there are 20 or so.  I uncovered 86% of the map but only recovered 50% of the weapons, and I spent a lot of time trial-and-erroring many of the spaces, which means that some of these must have been really well hidden.  Unfortunately, I'm at a point in my life where trial-and-error gameplay is supremely uninteresting to me, so that was a mark against.  

 

I didn't like the Edin boss - the giant hornet - because I couldn't get close enough to use the weapons that I had without opening myself up to the really damaging stinger attack, which seemed to come out randomly.  Also, the final boss was super-cheap.  Apparently it's much easier if you have the Orbital Discharge (According to a walkthrough), but I have no idea where that is.  I used the Kilver to take out the satellites quickly, and if one would get hung up right in front of the vulnerable tile, I'd switch to the Intertial Pulse, which would blast straight through the satellite and also damage the tile.

 

Once I found the Lightning Gun and the Shards, I almost exclusively used those.  

 

The alien lore seemed useless to me because I had no way to translate it (is there a translator that I missed?), I didn't use most of the weapons (hell, I didn't even find most of the weapons, and I entered the Secret World by accident, left because Elsinova told me I shouldn't be there, and then I couldn't find the entrance again, so I missed some valuable stuff, like the Heat Seeker.

 

I spent a ton of time trying to get back west from Kur, only to discover that the game purposefully traps you there until you get the item that lets you double-tap to jump further.  I needed a walkthrough to figure out what to do once I got to Edin, because I just couldn't figure it out - there was a door that I missed.

 

So all in all, I did really like this game, but it felt like it has a lot of bloat.  Weapons are key items and in my opinion, shouldn't be hidden the way that the game hid them.  

 

Also, the soundtrack is outstanding.

[SuperBiasedMan]

Finished this streaming last night. Echoing a lot of the thoughts here, I think I'd have put it down sooner if I wasn't on a stream. A good game overall, could have been great if it was 2/3 or half as long. Forget about the guns, there were too many power ups. And it just kept providing new ones. I'd love to see what this game was like if the glitch gun was the focus of how you progressed. But it seemed to be dropped as you got further along in favour of the drone or teleporting. The grapple actually became redundant.

 

They had cool power ups, but too many and too few reasons to care about using them.