Axiom Verge review

It's usually a good sign when a game opens with scientists muffing things up, leading to disaster. That's how Half Life began, of course, and if you go further back it's also how Another World opens. Trace, the peculiarly named hero of Axiom Verge, is very much in that mould.

His vague

experiment leads to an accident which seemingly kills him - except he awakes in a strange new world that, it must be said, looks a lot like a NES game. A mysterious female voice gets him up and moving, and before you know it he's acquired the first of many weapons and is hopping from platform to platform, blasting the weird biomechanical creatures that want to do him in, and trying to find his way back to normality.

In case you haven't guessed from the screenshots, Axiom Verge is a Metroidvania game, that hybrid genre where traditional linear platforming gets shaken up by an ever-expanding suite of gadgets and abilities, each of which allows you to bypass obstacles or access areas that had previously been off limits. The longer you play, the more of the map you can explore.

Read more…