October Assassination #1

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Axiom Verge was a disappointment. Widely claimed as a great Metroidvania, which is my favorite genre, I assumed there would be no way not to enjoy this game, right? But it fails at the three things that makes Metroidvanias incredible for me - combat, movement, and exploration.

Starting with combat. Axiom Verge gives you one option: ranged combat. You're stuck to the 8-way directional for aiming your shots, and while you have a huge range of weapons (I beat the game with 12 or so), most are useless or incredibly situational. You'll frequently be unable to hit enemies a bit above or below you because of the odd angles the 8-way directional forces on you, and while I can see this being an aesthetic design choice ("Look, we're retro, let's emulate Metroid"), I'm sure retro games would have preferred free aiming if they had the tech to do so at the time. Axiom Verge does, decides to not use it, and it's a lesser game for it.

Now, movement. It starts bad, like any other Metroidvania, but barely improves. There's no running, double jumping, wall climbing or hanging, dash, or any of the actual cool movement abilities you would expect. Instead, you get a janky-as-hell grappling hook that barely functions, yet is required to progress into many frustrating areas of the game; you get a teleport that also decides to work whenever it wants, not when you want it to; and finally, a spider drone, that half the time fails to launch and your character launches the hook instead. Not only is mobility limited, the limited mobility you have is also bad. Considering the absurd amount of backtracking and verticality on display here, it's wild they decide this was good enough. With poor combat and poor movement, you cannot create memorable boss fights or gauntlets, so the game doesn't have the same oomph that the Mantis Lords in Hollow Knight, Elsom the Oger in Ghost Song, or Granfaloon in Castlevania SOTN.

And finally, exploration. I didn't mind the lore at first, but it mostly went nowhere. I think my biggest issue here is that the world is uninteresting - it's very samey and barren. There are little to no NPC's, only the giant sleeping heads telepathically talking to you that I found very hard to empathize. You hear of the villain but don't see it or it's actions until the last 3 minutes of the game. There is little to interact with, no one to talk to, and all areas are kind of generic and similar, so it feels you're going around in circles while playing the game.

Sincerely, I have a very high bar for Metroidvanias, and Axiom Verge is far from what I would consider a good one. At least I also got Blasphemous, so let's see what it is all about shall we