izigame.me

🚨This game has gotten a massive update recently in which it seems they addressed the vast swath of issues in this review. I will update this review once I've played enough of it!🚨
AK-xolotl has the core of a good roguelike but with a seemingly never-ending list of surface-level issues that could simply be solved if the devs cared, but I don’t think they do.
This game clearly has a ton of inspirations taken from a ton of roguelikes, and references to other indies, and an understanding and love for the genre. Unfortunately they don’t seem to care about their own game very much.
The core of the game is fun, and for the most part, I enjoyed playing it. The controls feel correct, killing stuff is satisfying enough, the bosses are great, and the game technically functions like 80% of the time. The problem is that when it comes to visual polish in countless areas, hitboxes, item balance, rarity balance, ability balance, progression polish, pretty much any issue that could be easily fixed. Because all these things that would be pretty simple to solve they just didn’t bother to actually fix. The philosophy here seems to be “if it doesn’t crash the game, it doesn’t matter.” This philosophy is only acceptable in game jams, definitely not in commercial games, and especially not ones that have had content updates since release.
The complete disregard for visual polish is a big pet peeve for me, and this game has it in spades. Let me be clear, the works that the actual artists did, the pixel art itself, is fantastic. The issue comes with the implementation of it and just actual bugs. A lot of the game is rendered pixel-perfectly when it really shouldn’t be, because it fucks up sprites in ways that just look atrocious and would work better with full-res. Progressing through each room’s doors is meant to cut off the player at a certain point to give the illusion of depth but all but 1 area’s doors are fucked up, and this fix would literally take under an hour to implement which is the funniest part. Secret rooms’ entrance renders over the player even though it’s clearly meant to be underneath. There’s 0 reason not to spend like a day of development fixing these tiny but abhorrent issues.
The balancing is all wack in this game. Honestly, most items are actually okay, and fun, but there’s still so many that aren’t. So many that are stupidly weak and utterly useless and specific. Oftentimes items with downsides have wayyyy too big of that downside which makes it unbalanced and anti-fun. The rarities are the main thing that’s fucked up, as with the higher rarities they just… aren’t as good as the rarity would imply. These are really the most tame of balance fuck-ups in this game though, it gets a lot worse.
So how’s the chao-garden-esque part of the game? Well, raising axolotls is super easy and more of a chore than anything else. I love the idea of alternate skins like this, with different assigned passive and active abilities and class assigning, but it has major execution flaws. For one, the job of raising them involves tiny little “minigames” and while there appear to be 4 of them (still a pathetically small amount for how often you do them), there are really in essence only 2, because there are really only 2 mechanically different types of “minigames”. Another reason is because all of the passive abilities suck, and the only real active ability worth having is healing. The class assigning is probably the most interesting part of this system, so I really think the passive and actives should seek to serve it in some way to make it more interesting. Also, since healing is so important, I think that most of the active abilities should honestly be different approaches to healing. Maybe they can be heals that charge up in different ways, or for example an ability that, when you use it, makes it so that if the next enemy you hit has 3 status effects on it, you heal, and all the status effects from it get removed. The raising of axolotls is a neat idea but the way it’s actually executed sucks, and really wouldn’t take much effort or development time to fix, but that seems to be a common theme with everything in this game.
There are just some other baffling decisions/bugs that I feel like I need to rant about. The fire status effect overrides and removes the ice status, which is idiotic. Sure, it makes elemental logic, but that’s not how status effects in your game should work. Also, there is literally only one item that can apply the poison status effect. Why aren’t there bullet mods and orbitals like the other statuses all have?? Did you forget??? The rarity chances in this game are also fucked up, by which I mean that rainbow items literally show up more often than legendary items, which I’m damn sure isn’t intended. Also, there’s hardly any legendary or rainbow items?? I think there’s literally only one rainbow item. Unrelated, but whenever you get a gem chest, the gems for some reason don’t spawn there until like a second after you’re done picking your item, so I’ve gone out of gem pickup range and through an exit before the gems spawn, and end up leaving them there, uncollected. The area added in the beach episode update is WAY harder than its alternative and its boss is significantly harder than the actual fuckin final boss. Why. This game is really just littered with so many issues it’s hard to even remember them all, even now when I’m just fresh off of playing it for 36 hours.
Remember when I said that the game technically functions 80% of the time? Well that 20% when it doesn’t is when the game fairly often for some reason corrupts a run in the middle of itself and puts you in a weird limbo realm with a black background, scattered corpses of enemies, and no way to move or even pause, forcing you to exit by alt+f4ing. This can happen at any point in a run and means you lose all of your progress and resources from it, which is awful! It’s a bug I got at least 5 times, it’s not nearly as rare as it should be. Also, one of the easiest achievements in the game, that 25% of players have, was completely bugged for me.
The thing that cemented this as a negative review was the endgame. To get all of the achievements you need to unlock all of the weapons and items, which makes sense. What makes it hellish is that the meta-currency you need for them is WAY too rare. After I had beaten the game 10 times I still spent 15 hours grinding specifically and as optimally as I could for the gems to finish unlocking everything. That is absurd.
So, in conclusion, I know this review was pretty scathing, but that’s because I love and care about this genre, which the devs also seem to. I actually enjoyed most of my time with this game, but I think it’s important to state the endless surface-level issues with it. I find these kinds of aggressively mediocre roguelikes to be grating. But unlike Neon Abyss or Undermine, I think AK-xolotl can actually just fix itself up almost entirely in just one update that takes a month of development time MAX. But I unfortunately don’t think they will. In an endlessly growing sea of roguelikes, AK-xolotl doesn’t stand out.
Play the games that inspired it. Gungeon, Revita, Nuclear Throne, and Archvale are way better uses of your time.
AK-xolotl is an overwhelmingly flawed roguelike but ak-tively doesn’t seem to care. 🥩
Objective - 5/10;
Subjective - 4/10;