izigame.me

My first impression of The Axis Unseen was that it was a gorgeous game, with exceptional sound design and music, that has boring, basic gameplay (and some jank). On the downside, it has a lot of collision issues, wonky physics, and is difficult to navigate (you spend a lot of time doubling back to find all the things and portals). This game looks fantastic, sounds fantastic, and is immersive as hell. The developer is a seasoned digital artist and that is very apparent here. Scoring hits on enemies with the bow is very satisfying and a lot of fun. You get a sickening splat sound, lots of blood, and a temporary slow-mo effect which just just awesome and does not get old! This is the main hook of the game. Ambiance, sound, shadows, music, everything "art" here is simply excellent, an obvious professional effort.
The basic gameplay loop is similar to an extraction shooter, you kill monsters with a bow, gather their life energy, and return to a portal to spend that energy on level-up type buffs: speed, stealth, health, spirit energy (magic), and jumping/acrobatics. If you die, you get one chance to retrieve the lost energy. Sneak up on monsters, poke them full of holes, rinse-repeat.
As I racked up more hours in the game, the initially unimpressive gameplay really turned into something special as more regions, tools, spells, enemies, and powers opened up. At first, in the beginning region, you have basic monsters to bow-hunt, and basic wooden arrows to take them down. Not much else aside from a really cool spirit arrow to scout with. While landing a money shot is extremely satisfying, the AI is rather basic, and in the beginning with few tools, I found myself getting rushed by a lot of creatures with few options to counter. The gameplay loop was rather basic and boring IMHO, especially as monsters got caught on rocks and trees (this problem has been somewhat-successfully patched out at time of writing).
Over time, the game got fantastic! One element that really elevated it was the sheer variety of enemy abilities in the later biomes. There are some really cool concepts implemented on the monsters, making them have a LOT of variety in your approach to hunt them, and in the way they evade and kill you. Going from my early first impressions, I was not expecting the sheer creative variety that appeared. In short, the monsters tend to have various ways to spoil your hunting methods, requiring thoughtful new strategies that differ depending on what you are dealing with. One example, there are some monsters that are pretty tanky, once you hit them, they know where you are and you can't put arrows in them fast enough to take them down before they close the distance and kill you. These things were giving me fits. However, you receive a spell that allows you to put bleed on your arrows, and another that allows you to teleport . So I hit it with a bleed arrow, then teleported onto a structure unscathed until it bled out. Watching it fall was EXTREMELY satisfying, as the bastards were killing me left and right before I figured that out. Abilities often seem useless at first, but if you're creative, they become indespensible. The mechanical design here is very impressive and is a lot of fun.
As gorgeous as the first level is, later on, the environments are simply stunning. Simply beautiful and immersive, especially the "Darkness" level.
Praise aside, there are a few things here that detracted from the game a bit:
1. Collision: There are problems with environmental collision and with monster collision: Things like: (1) You can jump "out of the map" into mountains and will find yourself floating at times or at others, falling through the world. (2) When jumping onto objects (to climb) you bounce off of them when it looks like you have a ledge, or otherwise shouldn't (collision models seem to be larger than the objects, they feel badly tuned sometimes). (3) Monsters swipe at you, miss by a meter, but still hit you.
(SIDE NOTE: As far as arrows collision goes, collision between your arrows and the monsters is spot-on, that appears to have received a lot of attention from the dev)
2. Navigation: The developer states that navigation should be natural due to the obvious large objects and beams you should always be moving toward. This works well in the first (demo) area, where you have lots of light and visibility. However, in some areas (such as the second: the swamp) for a significant portion of playtime it is either nighttime, or weather/fog effects severly impact you vision. It is very easy to lose your sense of direction (in combat, or in a pit/valley, for instance), and you can't get your bearings because all of the distant objects are obscured. If you don't like to get lost or hate difficult navigation in games, this one may drive you crazy. At the same time, it also opens the game up to open discovery, so not all bad!
3. Navigation (part two): It is not always apparent where you have and haven't been. I lost a lot of time backtracking to areas I'd already been because I couldn't tell if I had been to that structure or not.
4. AI is a bit basic, every enemy has four obvious AI states: Wander aimlessly, rush last sound it heard, rush player, flee player. In addition, it sometimes gets stuck in the environment. However, the variety in the "abilities" of the enemies make up for this substantially from a gameplay perspective, and do mask the problem a bit.
5. It is difficult to read your situation without a HUD. I'm not suggesting that one be added, but pointing out that sometimes in the heat of combat or a critical situation, it is difficult to tell (for instance) what spell you have ready or how much health you have. It takes a second to glance at all the symbols on your hand and bow and process it, when you may only have milliseconds to react.
6. Bloom effects sometimes are excessive. The biggest problem is when the bloom obscures the symbols on your hand and bow to the point (sometimes) of being unreadable. The game could really use a bloom adjustment slider, or some fixes to ensure that hand/bow symbols are easily visible at all times.