Axiom Verge 2 Review (Takken)
I both Can and Can't recommend Axiom Verge 2. The game has a tremendous amount of upsides... and a tremendous amount of downsides.
Pros:
+The Standalone Story is great!
+-The super varied combat system lets you tackle situations in a good variety of ways... sometimes. The problem is that most enemy placements end up being very repetitive, and when they aren't then the enemies end up getting in guaranteed hits anyways. The game has such a huge problem with trying to make interesting enemy placements that the Devs gave THREE Mega-heals that heal 50% of your insanely huge health pool... Speaking of which...
+The backgrounds and stage-art look significantly better than Axiom Verge 1.
+Is a great Stand-alone game.
Cons:
-You are way too tanky for no reason. The game's combat is so poorly designed that instead of trying to fine tune it, the Devs went "screw it, the player won't care about taking guaranteed hits if they have a metric F**k-ton of health."
-The story and gameplay pacing is bad in quite a lot of areas with not enough time given to certain aspects of Indra's character and *too* much time spent with little to no characterization of her.
-Not a good sequel. The themes and world introduced in the 1st game are not expanded upon or hinted at. This game only shares a name and 6-ish journal entries about Trace and the themes present in Axiom Verge 1.
-Very often there will be an upgrade and as a player you want to use this upgrade to explore the world more but that upgrade can only be used in specific areas that scream "USE ME, USE THE SUPER EXPLODEY BOMB". This would be fine, but there's so MANY upgrades like this that you'll very often run into every possible side-path before finding the ONE area that actually continues the story,
-The enemy variety is weirdly lacking, even towards the end of the game. There are only 11 enemy types in the entire game:
1. drone that runs and zaps
2. Walker with big legs that shoots minigun... and sometimes zaps.
3. bird that shoots
4. Fake block Shuriken
5.Anenome Tendril Robot
6. Tentacle monster
7. Robo Spider
8. Spartan Drone spawner
9. Flying thing that shoots downward.
10. Things that stay on the walls and crawl around on them
11. Bosses
And until you get halfway through the game, most of these enemy types are **not** present. so as a player you better get used to killing #1 and #2 in most rooms... if you even want to do combat at all. Where A.V.1 made combat a forced part of gameplay(where enemies would outright stop the player if they weren't dealt with), A.V.2. makes combat... not even worth it. There is only one required boss to beat the game, and that's the final boss.
-----------------
Overall I would recommend the game, but not to fans of the original...