Axiom Verge (Wii U, PS4, Vita, Xbox One, PC)

AXIOM_BOXSo Federation Force may not have been the Metroid game that fans wanted, but luckily you can get your 2-D Metroid-style game fix in with Axiom Verge.  In the game you play as Trace, a scientist who gets caught in an explosion in a lab in New Mexico.  But instead of dying or winding up in a hospital, you are transported to an alien world, and it’s up to you to survive, explore, and find out how you got there in the first place.  Axiom Verge is a 2-D platforming 16-bit style game very similar to Super Metroid on the SNES.  It’s available for download on nearly all current consoles, but reviewed on Wii U here.

As Trace, the main things you do in the game are run, jump, and shoot.  As you explore the alien world, you’ll collect all manner of weapons to defeat aliens and robots with.  Shotguns, flamethrowers, electric pulses, shrapnel shards, you name it.  Some enemies are weaker against certain weapons, and it’s up to you to figure out which guns are most effective for the situation.  Other items you get in the game help you get around and explore new places, like higher jumping, warp coats, drones that can fit in small places, weird digitizing guns and bombs, and a grappling hook.  You’ll also find items that can increase your health and weapon power. 

Similar to Super Metroid, there are save points every so often on the map that you can step in and refill your health.  You can also save at any time, but when you restart or die, you’ll go back to the last pod you saved in.  You’ll also have to do a bit of backtracking around the interconnected map, but most of the time it’s not too much of a hassle as you can view the map of where you’ve been on the subscreen.  There are two difficulty selections at the start: Normal and Hard.  Normal is about on par with the difficulty in Super Metroid, maybe a teensy bit harder in places here and there.  There’s also a special speedrun mode for experts.

The game does have a few problems here and there.  Trace is a bit slow and clunky and not as much fun to control as acrobatic bounty hunter Samus.  The controls for using some of the items take a bit of getting used to as well, like the grappling hook.  Sometimes goals and objectives are a little unclear, and since the storyline is kind of garbage, that doesn’t help matters much.  There are also nonsensical notes you can collect and an option to enter in secret codes which must be very hard to find in the game.  The graphics can be a bit garish in places, which isn’t much of a problem but there are a few times where the visuals make it hard to figure out where you can and can’t go.  But other than that, this is an excellent game and one of the best I’ve played all year.  It really reminds me of my favorite time in gaming: the 16-bit days.

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Kid Factor:

Axiom Verge is rated T for Teen with ESRB descriptors of Violence, Blood, and Language.  You do shoot all manner of aliens and robots with many kinds of weapons, and they explode and fall to pieces when defeated.  When you die, you just fall down and your digitized bits go back to the last save area.  I really don’t remember seeing any blood, and the 16-bit visuals keep the violence from being too graphic anyway.  There are a few damns and hells in the text, but that’s all the bad language I can remember.  I’d probably be ok with most preteen kids playing this, especially if they can remember and/or appreciate the 2-D Metroid games, and are up to the challenge.

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