izigame.me

I started the game just after finishing for the second time, in a long time, Axiom Verge 1 , and although I need to remind myself that I could review this game on its own, cleansing my palate so the flavor of the first dish doesn't interfere with the second, the name of the game is literally Axiom Verge 2 , and I think I could expect at least a similar level of enjoyment that I had with the first.
The visuals are great; the game looks great. They are cohesive, and all of them blend together. If you have problems differentiating the background from the walkable platforms, there are accessibility options you can mess with - thank you, Thomas, for that. The music is good; however, its placement is weird. Music and its cultural elements are used as an instrument to introduce us to a story... So why is it playing this ethnic, Mediterranean, acoustic song if I can see snow, ice, and gray rock? Other songs would've fit better in different areas. Most of the time, it can be pretty jarring because the traveling is extensive, and you not knowing where to go means that you will be hearing it on loop. But I've listened to other songs from other areas, and they're good; it's not like I only heard the first. The singing voice would be much better if it was lowered in volume, though.
The mechanics of the game are dogwater, simply put like that. Combat is now reduced to a short, clunky melee attack, and the ranged option is a boomerang, meaning you can fire it once and wait for it to return - you can also hit it away again, but ain't nobody got time for that. It is just not designed to hit enemies which fly away or are half your height anyway. I know this wouldn't be a problem on its own, (I 150%'d Blasphemous , and that game is all hack and slash), but here the enemies are fast, erratic, and overly aggressive. You definitely will find yourself launching your remote drone to clear your path upfront because it does it faster and it has its own health pool, then going in human form later. Oh! And why!? Why do you have to interrupt the movement of the human character when it does the melee attack!? I don't care whichever -vania this is from; how do you even playtest and still think this is a good idea? I am absolutely sure that other players also abused the drone launch+teleport trick in AV1 like me because that was really fun while still challenging in some places. Here, it feels like it's backward - you play a drone which happens to have a human you can also use. The upgrade you get to climb ledges is not swift enough and doesn't respond to diagonal input, only straight up (another score for Blasphemous ), and I stopped the first session with frustration after I fell into a place where you can only get out by activating a platform with the drone using hacking - for the second time. Ah yes, the hacking! I quickly realized that this would be the only playable option left for me with the human character, and I just sprint through enemies, hacking them and doing somewhat of a pacifist gameplay. But then again, why can't I satisfyingly shoot them like we did in AV1? This issue is magnified because you will be traveling back and forth, up and down, with a tediously slow character... God, you'd think you got a puzzle figured out, just to realize you have to walk across the world again to unlock something else elsewhere. It surprises me that in this game, there is an equivalent of a water level, but it is surprisingly good... for one reason that would've made the game better: there is an upgrade which makes you move faster. I also stopped after the second session because, after a switch puzzle which opens the passage of the lake, there is another one elsewhere I don't know.
Comparing to AV1, the story of the game is thrown at you all at once, along with the atrocious choice of font we get. Instead of slowly unfolding the events and showing us the world (something that AV1 did masterfully), from the very start, you learn that there was a bankrupt company, a CEO woman who bought it, and that somehow she is looking for her daughter that she doesn't even mention once through half of the game. In a game where you're not seeing the faces of the characters, all of the connection with them is done via text and images in cutscenes and their interactions with both themselves and the world. Here, you, the player, are unsettled; however, the protagonist does not find it weird how: a) she got herself inside a hollow Earth, b) there is advanced technology merged with ancient Sumerian figures, c) she fucking died and got resurrected by some technology which was inside of an urn, d) the NPCs don't fucking care either. The inability to predict how the player would feel seeing those things happening and not expressing it through the character makes the whole experience really flat - you don't really care much about the story or the ones involved because you don't feel depth. (In Hyper Light Drifter , due to lack of verbal storytelling, the background itself is used to communicate to you that there were events in the world that you should care about - specially referring here to the wolf soldiers in the west.)
I don't know what was tried here, but it is just not enjoyable. I don't care about the protagonist; I can't be arsed to run hell and back across the world. I'll borrow Reggie's words: If it is not fun, why bother? If it is not a battle, where is the fun?