I've already completed Ori by they way but I have held off on telling the tale of that game overall because I felt like I was overkilling my coverage of it.
I put Axiom Verge on a system of mine in the past, but didn't really "Get it" back then and it didn't last long on my system. This time I was playing in on Nintendo Switch and although some of the controls are a bit janky with the standard controller, overall this is a wonderfully made game that is really going to appeal to fans of the original Metroid games.
While it avoid copying the story of Metroid, especially during the first portions of the game, it seems as though it is a mod for the Metroid game rather than its own free-standing title.
You are on an alien world and you have a bunch of weapons that constantly get changed and upgraded based on things that you find. As is often the case with games of this type there are certain things that you simply cannot reach at first when you are weak but as you get more and more items, more areas of the map open up to you.
You never turn into a rolling ball the way that you did in Metroid and this may have been a legal matter. Instead, you are able to deploy a drone that just happens to be the same size as the compact Samus rolling ball. It has other skills that Samus never had such as the ability to never perma-die but it lacks any sort of bomb placing ability. It's different enough I guess.
Nintendo is kind of well-known for suing almost anyone, so it is a wonder that this was not the case with Axiom Verge because there is no denying its similarity to Metroid.
To me, it functioned a lot like Super Metroid as far as controls and movement were concerned, but it also kind of has it's own thing going as "glitches" are frequently encountered in the game and at first, this made me think there was a problem with the game. Nope! That is the way it is meant to be and it has something to do with you (your character) being stuck in some sort of Matrix environment that is pointed out to you more and more as you progress along.
you encounter a boss quite quickly in the game's progression and it is just difficult enough that it is likely to kill you a time or two, but simple enough that you are going to have it figured out after that many times.
The same can be said for almost every other boss in the game. In one of the boss situations you are intentionally not given a save point close to it but then it is a fight that you cannot possibly lose, which I thought was an interesting twist. The entire time I was thinking "what the hell? I'm going to have to backtrack for ages to get to this fight again" only to have it be a fight where the tables turn and you cannot be defeated.
There are lots of fun little things like this in the game.
The bosses are sometimes extremely large and while this is quite common these days, they were not in Metroid or even Super Metroid because the systems couldn't handle such things back in the late 80's and early 90's.
This nostalgia factor is going to affect older gamers more. I think that younger gamers might fight this title a bit boring because they don't know what it was like to have some rather huge limitations as far as gaming was concerned back in the day.
I think one of the strongest points of this game is the huge variety of weapons that you will find, some of them are extremely powerful as well.
All of the weapons have some sort of particular purpose but some of them are a bit, dare i say, overpowered. The flamethrower for example, makes easy work of almost anything you encounter including the final boss. This weapon is not so easy to acquire though and unless you do some serious exploring, you aren't going to find it.
That is one of the main things that I did enjoy about this game. There are a ton of secret areas. Even though I really felt like I checked basically everything that could be checked on the map, I only revealed at 80% of the overall map and less than 70% of the items and upgrades that are possible in-game.
One of the most unique items is something you discover very early on. It is called the "Address Disruptor" and it is a ray gun of sorts that will reprogram certain block in the game as well as enemies. It doesn't work on everything but when it does do something it can open a new path or even turn difficult mobs into something that spits health at you instead of things that harm you. Other times it can make an enemy easier to hit and other, rare times it can make the enemies more difficult. You just have to remember which one is which!
This is not a huge game. I was tooling along at a slow pace and taking in all the environment without looking up anything online and it took me just over 12 hours to defeat it. The speedrun record for completion by someone with serious autism is just over 30 minutes. Most YouTubers who are doing a walkthrough will finish it all in about 5 hours.
So it's definitely not a long game but it is super cheap and you get that feel-good feeling of knowing you are supporting an indie developer. This is about as indie as it gets too because the first Axiom Verge game was made by just a single person.
Thomas Happ was a programmer or something for Game Boy and it took him between 4 and 5 years to make this game. He did everything including all the music, which is pretty damn awesome too. Apparently it was just a side project that he worked on at night and weekends while he was full-time employed at I think it was Nintendo at the time. Apparently he has no ties whatsoever to Metroid and this might be part of the reason why Nintendo didn't sue him.
You can get this game for around $20 no matter what you are playing it on. It is available on almost anything, including Linux if you can believe that.
I thoroughly enjoyed this game but will admit that a large part of the reason why that is the case is because I love Metroidvania games and I was there, 3000 years ago, when Metroid first launched on the NES.
I don't necessarily think it is worth $20 though even though it is as indie as they get.
All uncredited images are from my own gamelay
