I can't keep comparing games to other games, I'm getting too old and out of touch for that.
This game is a side-scrolling shooter with tight controls and mechanically rewards players for exploration. Players with incredible attention to detail will enjoy the way items are hidden. The way some secrets are concealed can be incredibly harsh, but if you discover them, it'll feel even more rewarding for overcoming the challenge.

Even though I felt like I was excruciatingly thorough, I do not feel cheated by the secrets that I missed, and I am glad that they are used so cleverly. I guess to criticize it, some of the solutions felt very rare or like surprise one-offs that added to their sense of excessive difficulty.

The game itself is not actually punishing however, and while many of the guns are cool to discover and, agreeing with the developer, provide life-blood to exploration through very fun rewards... Most of the discovered guns are far from required for completing the game. Upgrades that improve your general abilities, such as damage per shot and max health are hidden as well.

Again, this is an exploration game as well as an action game!

Some of the easier to find weapons are placed in map areas that seem to suggest a Zelda-inspired(whoops) approach to game mechanics, where the area will often contain a wepaon that seems to be designed specifically to defeat a nearby boss. This isn't *always* the rule, and all of the bosses can be defeated in a wide variety of means. That really adds a lot to ... letting the player approach combat in creative ways.

The story is pretty good as well, and I won't talk too in-depth about its details, but it manages to weave its narrative in with its artwork and mechanics very well! The digital effects, the subversive effects in a not-quite-16bit world, and the biomechanical all work well together to give the game an alien atmosphere.

The music is enjoyable, too. Loads of synth. Probably my favorite track is the title music. It gave the correct first impression that it was a very electronic, oppressive atmosphere, but that you'd be READY for it.

My complaints with the game are minor.

Sound design only fails with hitting invulnerable armor. The sound effect stacks loudly.

There is a small issue with not having enough tools to identify whether or not you missed secrets regardless of the reminder system (you place waypoints on map regions that persist until replaced) because it's possible to miss secrets that are in plain sight by tiles that may not respond to the tools you had 2 hours ago. That doesn't happen very frequently, it should be noted, and most of the secrets can still be discovered by being thorough, and being gated by map access (blank spots in the map mark obvious ways to continue exploring as you upgrade).
And again: The secrets I missed were ingeniously hidden.

Also there's a speedrun mode and a silly reference to Metroid if you're into that sort of thing. It's always interesting to look up such things after playing a beloved game and exhausting it of gameplay.

Amazing game. Beautiful music.

A true successor to Super Metroid.

And all made by just 1 person.

I like that one guy made a better Metroid game than Nintendo

tl;dr This game is an excellent successor to the Metroid style platformers. You should get it if you liked those.

Wow, where do I even begin? I installed this to see how it was. Here I am, 13 hours later and I binged it. Played it in two 6-ish hour sittings because I couldn't stop for anything but falling asleep. There's a lot to talk about with this game, both good and bad.

This is the meat and potatoes of the game. This is what's going to keep you occupied for most of the time, so it's important that this works well. It does. I've found very few situations where I was annoyed or bored with the game. The shooting feels great and suitably difficult and kept fresh by the insane variety of weapons and tools at your disposal. I particularly enjoy that each weapon more or less seem to have a specific playstyle and enemy type in mind, which keeps you varying up as the game goes along. There were a few I simply didn't find useful at all, being the Nova (which you get very early), Firewall and Multi Disruptor. The only thing that stood out to me was the grappling hook. Yes, I'm spoiling that because the grappling hook exists in every Metroid game ever, so it's not a big deal. It doesn't act like other grappling hooks and that threw me off a lot and it took me about an hour of gameplay to get used to how it works and its quirks.

Enemy variety is good, although you keep crossing back through several areas multiple times, and this is where enemies can become very familiar after a while. There's also not really that many different types of enemies. You have wall crawlers, static sentries, chasing sentries and different kinds of flyers. But their art style, sound and attacks keep them from becoming stale regardless.

Bosses are suitably huge and while the first boss is a real pansy, they quickly become trickier and trickier to the point where you sometimes completely fail to understand how to beat it until you've tried different tactics.

Enemies are suitably difficult and as you ramp up in power with new weapons and strength, so do the enemies. I found that towards the very end of the game enemies became really difficult and I found myself dying a couple of times to certain rooms. This can frustrate some players, but I found it to be enough to simply press on. The game also allows you tools to explore ahead of you and deal with dangerous threats without really putting yourself in danger, on occasion. It's however incredibly easy to forget you have these tools.

I have rarely found a game that compels me to explore so much as this game. While the storyline is fairly straight forward in where you need to go and what to do, this opens up later in the game, but I never felt I was stuck wondering what to do. I always knew almost exactly where to go next to progress the story, and when I didn't feel like doing that or I got a new tool I felt the urge to go back to older areas and explore and see what new areas I could visit with the help of the new tools. It's absolutely awesome in that regard. It rewards exploration greatly. My only complaint would be that some puzzles were perhaps just a little bit too obtuse, requiring me to really use my head. When a game makes me take out my notebook and start deciphering messages, it's a good game.

I won't spoil any specific abilities you get in the game as I felt they were an incredibly refreshing array of abilities that I quite frankly haven't seen much in this kind of game. Usually what you get is the basic double jump and perhaps a dash and that's it. This game allows you to explore and manipulate the environment in such a way that you quite often forget just how much freedom you really have, and get stuck on a simple puzzle because you forgot you had this awesome ability that would let you pass this obstacle, because other games wouldn't have let you do that. It's definitely one of the games' great strengths, and also perhaps a weakness. Because, as I said, more than once I ran around lost because I forgot that the game allowed me to do things other games wouldn't and therefor I didn't think of them.

This is a matter of taste. Some people can't stand the SNES style graphics and I respect that. However, I found them to work excellently for this game, and overall I found most areas to be distinct and creative, matching with its enemies. I have nothing to complain about here. Everything looks crips and colorful and effects are nice and easy to digest.

Sounds were very distinct and I could quickly learn what meant what, which is a good thing from these types of games. Usually sounds can be confusing, but I found every sound to be familiar after a while, which meant new sounds stood out and made me stop and wonder what that was. Music was really great and I liked almost every track with few exceptions. It has a chiptuney electronic soundtrack that fits the graphics style and the dark story perfectly.

I grew up with the IBM 5150 and later the NES as my go to computer and console gaming as a child, so perhaps my expectations on a story are somewhat lower than others. Back then most games had a throwaway story, fitting on one page of the manual. It was all about the gameplay. This game surprised me with having a very Flashback-y style story with dialogue and I was really surprised to find myself being drawn in and wanting to know more. The world is simple, but crafted very well and the story is really very basic once you've seen it all. But the way the story is told keeps you guessing and wondering. On more than one occasion I admit to have been "mind blown" over how the story progressed. In spite of it being so it was still easy to follow and it really kept me wanting more.

The game has fullscreen and windowed mode, as well as graphics scaling to allow you leeway in the size of the window, should you go for windowed mode. Sound and music have separate sliders. Controls are rebindable for both controller and keyboard. The game allows you to use either a list or a selection wheel for weapons.

The game took about 13 hours from beginning to end from me and that was with a lot of exploration and running lost looking for secrets (yes there are secrets). I can easily see someone spending 20 hours on a single playthrough with sufficient exploration. But looking back at it I could probably have rushed through the main story in 4-6 hours if I wanted to. It's a great testament to the game that it kept me engrossed for so long in spite of being comparatively short.

I heartily recommend this game to anyone who likes weird, dark, sci-fi stories and platformers of old. It's not an easy game, nor is it forgiving. The puzzles take some real thought and it will put your platforming skills to test. But it's a great little game and when I see it was developed by a single man I am more than impressed.

Never has a metroidvania-style game so engrossed and unnerved me with imagery alone. This is the type of game Cthulhu itself would beam into your frontal cortex if it was pleased with your service.

Tom Happ is on the short list of legends of 1 man developers who manage to make a masterpiece.

This game is amazing, for so many reasons. Play it on Hard your first blind playthrough, do yourself a service. Maybe it should be noted, I'm not sure I would like this game as much as I do without a controller (I used a 360 corded).

Game is worth every penny.

The game is just awesome.
The amosphere/design of this masterpiece is like if H. R. Giger and H. P. Lovecraft would have a baby, so that would be it.

I was little bit worried about how a game controller(for PS3, yea sorry guys I can't stand controller for XBox) would react under ArchLinux. Just plugged one into the PC and no problem at all.

Thanks guys.

The Metroid series may be dead, but its spirit lives on, and nowhere is that spirit stronger than in Axiom Verge. It has just the right amount of that familiar Metroid feel while also bringing plenty of new stuff to the table.

First, though, I want to get the handful of negatives I have out of the way. Personally, I didn't like the fact that the 'glitch dash' is activated by double-tapping the d-pad - I found myself activating it by accident quite frequently. While the game has an impressive amount of weapon variety, most of the weapons are not very useful - on my last playthrough where I acquired every single sub-weapon, I found that I only really used 4 or 5 out of the 20 or so in the game.

Those are minor nitpicks, however. If you love Metroidvania style games, Axiom Verge is absolutely a game you should try. It's got great level design, fun powerups, great boss battles, tight controls, and is just overall an incredibly tight package.

Super Metroid except better in pretty much every aspect. Doesn't feel obligated to just lift mechanics and power-ups from Metroid.

Metroid is an Axiom verge clone.