Axiom Verge 2 Review (Red Oni)
Truly awful, an absolute disappointment of a sequel.
If you liked Axiom Verge 1 you will probably not like Axiom Verge 2. Not long after you start the game you will get your first two weapons that are to put it charitably bad. A climbing axe which is your main damage dealer, and a boomerang that never ceases to disappoint. Neither of them will ever do enough damage to justify their existence outside of the fact that they are your only options.
Axiom Verge 2 is a departure from the first game in that the first had combat as part of the focus of the gameplay. In this game you should avoid combat if you can (you can't, most enemies will chase you to the ends of the earth if they are capable). When you do have to fight (which will be often) you will find yourself without the tools for the job, enemies will get hits on you and you will find it hard to avoid that, and enemies hit rather hard for a game that seems to want you to explore and search for things rather than fight. In the end you will find that you actually don't want to explore anything because death lays just around the corner at all times, and unlike souls like games where this is also the case, the combat systems in this game aren't made to deal with the enemies.
Siliconera stated in their review blurb that axiom verge makes every upgrade feel like a game changer, this is a lie. You will get upgrades to your skills, and outside of one of them, they don't seem to have any noticeable difference on your character. Perhaps I missed some, perhaps there were loads more upgrades out there for me to get, but after playing for an hour and a half I realized I wasn't going to make it to two hours. I wanted to put the game down, the game felt like it was wasting my time and it was already asking me to go through a water level for it. I wasn't about to brave the frustrating enemies that had large area of effect attacks or the small hard to hit surprisingly tanky robots that waited for me, or the mines (THOSE FUCKING HOMING MINES) again just to find that another piece to a puzzle I wasn't interested in.
My story with this game ends with a rich heartless CEO trapped in another dimension miserable and without the ability to ever truly die and quite frankly I'm happy with that.