Email: More on Axiom Verge

I can agree that Axiom Verge is not a good game.

I also got a copy for Switch, and I think I played it for several hours, so I have more than just a half-hour impression.

I didn’t dislike the main character, I didn’t have much trouble with the controls, and I actually liked the weapons, for the most part. And I wanted to like the game. I actually did like the game – at first. I wanted to finish the game, but ultimately, I doubt I made it even half way through before I couldn’t be bothered to keep playing.

The problem is that the game feels like a ‘key hunt’. You walk around, you find the next boss, you kill the boss, you get your next ‘key’, or item that’s required to unlock more of the map in the form of some power up or weapon. While I wasn’t bothered by this at first, the more the map opened up, the more I found myself backtracking, wasting time walking through areas I’d already seen multiple times over, and killing the exact same bad guys over and over again trying to find not just the next ‘key’, but what to use the latest ‘key’ on. It was especially frustrating because there were some ‘keys’ that seemed like they were very much supposed to open a certain ‘door’, only for it not to work that way.

I probably spent more time in the game walking around in circles than anything else, and it eventually got far too tedious to keep going. If I do ever play the game again, I’ll be using a guide so that I don’t waste more time having no idea where the next ‘key’ or ‘door’ is.

The other problem is that death is pretty much meaningless. The only penalty for dying is you’re zapped back to the last save point, meaning all you lose is time spent going back to the last place you died.

I won’t rule out the possibility of trying to finish it in the future, but with the limited time I have to play games and those that keep coming out and other games I already have that I’d like to get back to (Just started Hyrule Warriors for the first time last week, I doubt I’ll finish it before Octopath Traveler comes out and I move onto that…), I honestly doubt I’ll ever get around to it.

 

And there it is.