Retro games are nothing new, but there seems to be a recent resurgence of games that really want to take things back to the way they were. Not content just to to utilize pixel art like so many games before them, they seek to replicate the entire gameplay experience, from the chiptune music and limited color palette to the way the 8 and 18-bit games of yore played, even down to their limitations. Axiom Verge is perhaps the best example of this yet, providing the experience of an NES title all the way down to its visual glitches, which here can be manipulated in order to change the game world.
In the way that Shovel Knight was influenced by Mega Man, Axiom Verge is influenced by Metroid. Influenced is perhaps too soft a word- the game has almost direct send-ups of enemies, art, the music style, and even uses one of the game’s best-known secret codes in a really clever way. There's no hiding the game's legacy.
In it you play a scientist whose experiment blows up in his face, the way they often do, and is transported into a strange 2D world full of alien life forms and ghostly voices talking to him. You’ll start to load up on weapons and fight bosses, much as you’d expect from the game style. You’ve got a little map in the top right corner and you’re going to want to fill it all in, exploring a massive alien world and killing anything that moves.
You’ll find pretty much everything here that you’d expect from the style- power-ups that let you jump higher and explore new areas, health and power-ups scattered everywhere, even a clever little way of turning into a ball and getting into smaller cracks. An eventual drill upgrade lets you find breakable blocks in the environment and open up every area of the map that you can, while the a tool called the Address Disruptor lets you manipulate the before-mentioned glitches or even create your own. (Any enemy can be hit with this to turn into a different NES-style sprite glitch, which is both visually fascinating and useful.)
While it’s a more worthy successor to Metroid than Metroid: Other M, it really doesn’t do much of its own thing. There are no real surprises here for connoisseurs of the style, and while each new tool and weapon you get to play with is a joy, it’s all stuff we’ve seen in other games before. The idea of utilizing glitches to move around the environment or more easily take on enemies is a clever one, but it never feels fully fleshed out. But does that matter when the game is such a blast to play? Likely not.
Axiom Verge is so well-crafted that it absolutely belongs in your library, providing plenty of nostalgia flashbacks for old-school Metroid fans and a thorough lesson of what the new generation of gamers are currently missing.
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Axiom Verge was reviewed from an early PS4 code, and it’s also on the way to Vita (with cross-buy support) and PC. It’s available at 10% off its $19.99 price this week for PS Plus members, and they’re promising that they’ll let you know about any upcoming sales months in advance so you’ll never be taken by surprise, with no sales at all happening for at least six months.
