Axiom Verge Preview – A Taste of Secrets to Come

The pulsing, strange tunnels of Axiom Verge wriggle with a life of their own. They tremble as you approach, and even what appears to be solid brick wall shifts and changes before your eyes. This is a world in constant flux, one that hides dangers and valuable secrets under the ground. Thomas Happ, the one man development team who created it, doesn’t want all of those secrets coming to light just yet, and is spoon-feeding small slices of the game to gaming press. I got lucky enough to grab a tiny mouthful of the game, and after only an hour with the preview build, I want to feast.

Axiom Verge takes us back to the very roots of Metroid, doing away with much of the junk that has cluttered the genre or made it easier. You are the sum of your collected tools, and don’t expect to just find a hallway door with some goodies behind it. A few key items are out in the open for the player to find, but for the most part, items are hidden. Buried behind walls, under fleshy coverings, or hidden by tricks of the environment, everything you will desperately need to arm yourself with is out of sight. The game can be played without those items, but intrepid explorers will have a much easier time dealing with the strange creatures of this place.

There were a handful of goodies in the demo that I found. I picked up items that boosted my attack and item power, the size of my shots, and some increases in health. A few were easy to see, but many required me to pick away at the walls, checking to see if anything looked off. One important thing was that, after the first full health pickup I grabbed, the next health increase required me to find four more orbs (hello Heart Pieces). It’s unclear if weapon pickups will act the same way in the final build.

You’re not just shooting the walls with laser shots or missiles, either. Players will quickly find a neat drill attachment, and you’d better get used to the sound it makes as you use it to chip away at the walls. If a wall can be broken, it will change colors a bit when struck with the drill, letting you know to keep digging. It kind of bugged me that it took a few seconds to chew through a single rock, but a few secrets required that I not dig all the way through so it’s a necessary issue. Also, while certain walls can obviously be broken down with it, there’s more that show no indication until you start digging. Happ has no intention of making secrets easy to find, after all.

Most of the enemies didn’t go out of their way all that much to stop me from poking around during this build. Tame shelled creatures wandered around the platforms without a care in the world, nipping at my feet if I got clumsy enough to step on them. Luminous green insects flit through hallways, never deviating from their paths even when I was blasting them with laser fire. You have to go deeper into this world before you start running into the spider-like monsters that spew boiling liquids from their mouths, and the flying octopus-like beasts that fire beams from their eyes. Malfunctioning robot sentries, and strange humanoid beings that scream at you on sight are waiting deep below the planet’s surface, and while only a few of them were very hard, my limited health meant being very careful.

I died despite taking care, and the game’s story wove that into the narrative. I’m not sure what that might mean for the final game, as I’m wondering if my death count will matter in terms of story. It could just be the game’s way of playing around with player death.

I had an array of guns to help myself out with by the demo’s end. The basic gun flies straight and goes so far that it will hit monsters that aren’t even on the screen. It was a nice touch to have monsters dying before I even got to them. There was another gun that fired a shot that would split into a burst if you fired a second time, which was handy for triggering some doors and hitting bosses that had out-of-reach weak points. A short range three-way shot provided a little bit of fun, but the extremely short-ranged Kilver was the most fun to play with. It looses a burst of electricity right in front of the player that does a lot of damage, but involves risking yourself. I tend to play as a glass cannon in action games, so this was the gun for me.

I enjoyed taking these guns into the lonely, weird halls of Axiom Verge. They’re very colorful places, filled with broken machinery and strange rock formations. It’s very easy to tell which area you’re in, showing a lot of variety in location aesthetics, although there is a map to help you find yourself if you get lost. It was also handy when I came up to places I couldn’t go through in the demo. I found jumps I couldn’t make and secrets just out of reach, all leaving me wanting more when the demo wrapped up.

The gun sounds make the weapons appealing to use while exploring the pixelated halls. The basic weapon hits with a great crash, and enemies loose various cries and howls when hit. The Kilver hisses with energy when it fires. It all gives the weapons some nice punch to go along with the eerie soundtrack that plays in the background. It feels very lonely down in this lost world, compounded by some excellent music. There were only a few tracks during the short demo build, but they were all lovely and melancholy at the same time.

I have a hard time internalizing that Happ did all of this stuff by himself, even if it has taken him years to reach this point. If this short section of the game is any indication, it was all worth it, with Happ showing some incredible skill in every aspect of game design. The game’s visual presence is oppressive yet colorful, the weaponry and combat is simple but challenging, and the sound is creepy but well-suited to the environments. The game clicks together well, obviously the work of one very talented developer with a strong vision of what he wants his game to become.

Axiom Verge cannot come fast enough. The demo gave me the boot after I’d found some major character/device, and I scrambled to see if I could reload my save and putter around the environments some more to look for new secrets. I’ll keep going back as I wait for the next small morsel that drops from Happ’s table, as this is only the first of a few small previews that will lead up to the game’s full release. What new goodies will await me then? Double jump? New guns? I was told that this was only a hint of the 40 weapons/tools, 60 powerups, and 700 rooms the final game is going to have to offer, after all.

You can go to the developer’s site to learn more about Axiom Verge, and you can also follow the game on Facebook and Twitter.