This honestly sucks to write because i usually really love metroidvanias, but this one just didn't cut it for me. It feels dated and boring compared to other metroidvanias. It's cool but it just wasn't for me.

DEMON. ATHETOS SAY, KILL.

100/100, wish there could be an alternate end where Athetos actually tells Trace something. Though Elsenova would just probably kill Trace. Then again, Athetos is a scientist that has been working nonstop with technology from Sudra and had an epiphany about the world, shouldn't be impossible for him to save Trace if he really tried to, together with Ophelia.

If you are a fan of Metroid, then that's the game you are searching. Metroid: Zero Mission was the first game i ever played and Axiom Verge it's the closest thing to that game other then Metroid's sequels, you should really try this one

A good game with a few too many nitpicks in a genre full of amazing games. I would only recommend it to the biggest metroidvania fans who have yet to try it.

Axiom Verge is a hard one to review. It isn't a bad game, but it has enough annoying nitpicks for me to struggle to recommend it over the hundreds of incredible metroidvanias out there today.

Pros:
- Exploration is fun, especially once you have all your abilities
- The story is interesting, if a bit hard to piece together
- Abilities really are unique and unlike anything else in the genre

Cons:
- Enemies have way too much HP. I played on hard mode, so that may be a factor here. None of these enemies have particularly complicated attacks or movement patterns, they just take way too many hits to kill, making exploration agonizingly slow at points.
- No fast travel. Easily added an extra ~2 hours to my playthrough.
- Most of the weapons felt useless. I found over 10 weapons in my playthrough and only found three of them that really felt worth using.
- Some collectibles are in absurdly cryptic locations or locked behind the awful password system.
- No items or hints to help you find missing collectibles. You get a little dot on your area map if you found everything in the area, but no nudges in the right direction to find those missing things.
- Bosses are really boring. I only found one boss to be particularly challenging. The rest were too simple and uninteresting, even compared to the old games that inspired this one.
- Unavoidable damage is everywhere. Quite a few rooms have an enemy literally sitting at the entrance to the room. You enter the screen and immediately take damage. Some other enemies rush straight for you and stick to you before you can put out enough damage to kill them.

Axiom Verge isn't a bad game by any means. Despite the large list of issues I had with it, I still think the game is well-made for the most part, especially for being made by only one guy! I just can't strongly recommend it over the literal hundreds of metroidvanias that have been released in the last few years.

Overall it's fairly good, it's definintely got that old school feel to it, in graphics, design, and gameplay.

Overall exploration is nice, combat is ok... story is interesting if not a lot present. Ok experience, not amazing, but worth the time I'd say once past the best of the modern metroidvanias like hollow knight or Momodora RUtM, Ender Lilies, Or Afterimage.

Main issues are probably, that like many older classic games i'ts got some issues with controls, and clarity at times. Also can be slow to explore with no fast travel end game. Combat is often very simple and just repetitive or slow, and the dodge/dash you finally unlock is the most unreliable thing ever to use in combat...
Still, while there were more than a few moments that got frusterating or annoying, overall it was a pretty nice experience, and brought back some of that classic metroid feeling, if not quite as good, it could still have been a very solid game for the time.