Axiom Verge

Playtime: 12.8 Hours

Several years after giving up on the PS Vita version, I decided to do a salty runback of this game on the Switch version - this time, using a map & walkthrough for items and secrets so I wouldn't get stuck in the same way as my previous playthrough. With it, I did a playthrough on Normal getting 100% items, 100% map completion, and all 5 secret worlds (which are untracked in statistics). The Switch version had the advantage of an extra pair of shoulder buttons, so I didn't have to do weird touchscreen stuff; a huge improvement of the gameplay compared to the Vita.

- The world - visually - is very cool; kind of mysterious and creepy which works very well for this kind of game - Don't really know how much I care about the story, but the overall aesthetic and theming of the world, weapons, etc. are fantastic - Tons of weapons, but relatively few of them are actually any good. I love the variety though, and few/none of them are actively terrible - It's cool how they all feel quite different, and some of them (ex. Hypo-Atomizer) are very useful in certain boss fights/situations - Flamethrower is the be-all end-all once you get it - I got the Heat Seeker from the final Secret world - this thing is awesome too - Really liked lots of other weapons though. Axiom Disruptor, Kilver, Voranj, Orbital Discharge, Lightning Gun, Shards, Ion Beam (in addition to the others) are all very good. - Final boss is hilariously easy - Only summons sentries for offensive attacks. These do little damage and don't have too much health (note: I have all items for max damage buff) - Sentries also drop a TON of health. Even though I wasn't trying to dodge any of the attacks, I was regularly healing back up to full - Flamethrower just destroys this battle. Stand in one place, aim up, jump up and down while holding fire for about 2 minutes. Yep. - Secret worlds are cool - I like the CRT effect - Overall, I'm glad I did a redemption run (my redemption, the game was always great though not perfect) - Again, I got stuck in the PS Vita version since I missed some items and didn't have enough health/damage upgrades, making it super hard to get through the temple - That's why I used a walkthrough this time. Didn't really want to TBH, but I felt it was necessary for multiple reasons - Game feels quite tight, though movement and traversal mechanics aren't perfectly handled either - Grapple becomes almost completely useless once you get drone teleport and the coat - The hacking mechanic is really neat Gripes: - Several of the bosses, specifically the variants in the earlygame, are difficult to gauge where their health bar is at - They turn super red about 25% of the way into their health bar; I think this is because their sprites are already tinted a bit brown/red by default - Optimally, they should only be red once they're just about dead. This was kind of an annoyance for me - Boss pacing is a bit strange. The first third/half of the game has several boss fights, like 4-5 of them in pretty regular sequence - The second half of the game (including E-Kur-Mah, the big temple region) does not have ANY fights at all. Ukhu kind of but doesn't really count - The fights in the final zone are kind of a joke. You can facetank the Sentinel, skip Xedur Hul Variant, and the final boss (as said above) is free - To be fair, I spent a lot of time on the final collectathon. I still think pacing is a bit too frontloaded though. - The double-tap coat movement does not work well; it feels super awkward to execute, particularly when you're also trying to aim - I feel like exploration and secrets are a bit subpar - Environmental design is very noisy, and ends up feeling inconsistent. Hard to tell where some gaps in the walls are sometimes (for warping) - Quite a few secrets are also basically completely invisible until you get there - The Secret Worlds are implemented very well though. The visual effects are really cool - I spent forever trying to find the Hard one though, because it ended up requiring a really arbitrarily-placed mid-wall teleport (even after finding the effect) - Usually it's expected there should be a small indicator; this game's overall visual design is so noisy that it's functionally impossible to tell sometimes - 100% map completion is honestly kind of tedious and really annoying because of some giant empty maps that are a huge pain - Usually involves weird grapples, teleports, and max-height drone launches