There’s also an Arm that allows you to shift your consciousness to a drone so you can explore small spaces, as well as dimensional tunnels leading to the Breach. The hacking one is quite good because at a certain level, you can outright neutralize difficult enemies or make them fight the other enemies in the room. Each upgrade often comes in the form of a new Arm (like the first one that saved your life), some with their own sentient personalities. There’s a melee weapon, a boomerang for projectile attacks, hacking for doors and machines, and so much more. The tools to move forwardĪs mentioned before, Axiom Verge 2’s gameplay progression is the typical collection of tools that allow you to traverse the environment in expanded ways. The notes you come across and the rare encounters with various individuals in the wild is dizzying beyond the two main tasks of saving your daughter and escaping. Whether it’s scientists talking about the experiments that landed them there or the natives talking about the power bestowed upon them, Axiom Verge 2’s story delivery often feels inside baseball. The only thing that’s kind of a bother is that this game gets very hefty on the technical jargon. The areas are vast and varied and the music that permeates them deeply immersed me with a sense of isolation. She just wants to get her daughter back and get home, but it’s hard to ignore the background of wars between otherworldly groups, the sacrifice of humanity for power, and the subservience and defiance of god-like beings.Īxiom Verge 2 is a game well served by its pixelated background, as well as the atmospheric soundtrack featuring a wealth of electronica and haunting vocals. Each area features a wealth of drone combatants to either fight or avoid and you have melee and limited projectile means to attack them, but each upgrade in abilities gives Indra the means to dive deeper into a narrative that bends science fiction with Sumerian and Mesopotamian lore and mythology. You explore various areas, finding yourself blocked off at various points, and eventually finding means to overcome obstacles. Much of Axiom Verge 2 is the standard fare you might expect of a pixelated metroidvania. From here on, Indra continues her search for her daughter, following the bread crumbs left by an unknown entity, as well as searching for a way to return to Earth. Indra is almost killed by cruel fate before her journey can even begin, but a mass of nanomachines with a collective conscious known as an Arm embeds itself within her and imbues her with their power. It doesn’t take long for Indra to get caught up in scientific chaos and drawn into a parallel world where hostile machine drones attack any human on sight. However, when Indra gets there, she finds it looking abandoned. A mysterious message tells her to head for Antarctica where a rival corporation has set up scientific investigation. The story goes that billionaire and Globe 3 corporation CEO Indra Chaudhari is informed that her estranged daughter has gone missing. They deal in some shared concepts and narrative background, but you don’t need the first game at all to play the second. A billion dollars can’t buy loveĪxiom Verge 2 is quite separate from the first game. It doesn’t always keep things flowing very well and the story can feel outright esoteric at times, but Axiom Verge 2 adds some new tricks while keeping the spirit of isolation and exploration of the unknown intense in this side-scrolling platformer. Now in 2021, Axiom Verge 2 has arrived with a new adventure and many of the aspects we loved about the original. Thomas Happ successfully captured the nostalgia and isolation of early Metroid with beautiful, yet creepy pixel environments, characters, and creatures, and a good soundtrack to go with them. Metroidvania games seem to come at a dime a dozen these days, especially in the indie scene, but Axiom Verge was quite its own beast in 2015.
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