Overview
Axiom Verge 2 is a sci-fi action adventure metroidvania developed by Tomas Happ Games LLC, and is the sequel to 2015 indie metroidvania darling Axiom Verge. The game released on August 11, 2021. Just as with the original Axiom Verge, Axiom Verge 2 was developed solely by Tom Happ.
The second outing in the Axiom Verge universe is dramatically different from the first, and those who are going into this title expecting a similar experience to the original should drop those expectations right now. While some basic gameplay staples of the metroidvania genre remain intact, a lot of the actual gameplay loop and experience has been altered in some significant ways. Exploration and storytelling have eclipsed the significance of combat in this mind-bending multiverse adventure.
Axiom Verge 2 is fairly short, according to howlongtobeat.com the main story can take anywhere from 6 to 9 hours depending on your speed. Completionists may spend a slightly longer 12 to 16 hours taking a bit of extra time to locate all the secrets and collectibles scattered across the game world. There are no significant challenges that may threaten to derail your clear speed other than your own ability to find the places and items associated with a 100% run.
Axiom Verge 2 is currently available for the following platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC, Playstation 4, and Playstation 5.
Disclaimer: In my initial experience with Axiom Verge 2 I accidentally found a sequence break that caused me to trigger multiple dialogues early and spoiled major story elements and the natural progression path for me. I played through it multiple times to try and offset any negative bias that experience may have caused, but it happened and you should be aware. By the time of writing this I have completed the game 5 times in an effort to challenge my impressions and opinions, but I am human and therefore can not willfully erase my subconscious biases.
Story
Axiom Verge 2’s story is a continuation of the multiverse established in it’s predecessor, replacing once familiar characters and locations for a brand new setting with a brand new protagonist. Idling in the title screen of the game will play a short cinematic preface that introduces the main character and sets up the plot. Axiom Verge 2 takes place in the 2050s and tells the story of Indra Chaudhari, a corporate titan whose efforts to monopolize her industry lead her to purchase another mega corporation called Hammond Corp. The opportunity presents itself after Hammond Corp’s CEO Elizabeth Hammond mysteriously vanishes in Antarctica.
As a prize of the corporate takeover Indra acquires a prototype of a faster-than-light digital communicator, the Ansible, built by her competitor in 2007. Powering up the device shows Indra a strange message from an unknown sender that urges her to visit Antarctica if she ever wishes to see her daughter again. Having just acquired the Jones Station antarctic research base as a part of the acquisition, the place where Elizabeth Hammond vanished, she feels confused and uncertain as to what may await her if she were to travel there as instructed.
Indra arrives at the defunct Jones Station research facility by helicopter one year after Elizabeth Hammond’s vanishing. The player is given no additional context into the backstory, such as Indra’s daughter’s name, her age, their relationship, everything surrounding the situation is shrouded in mystery. The station itself is apparently abandoned, many tools and objects left behind from whatever operations Hammond Corp had underway at the site. Elizabeth Hammond’s strange disappearance hangs eerily in the atmosphere as Indra walks from structure to structure in search of a clue as to the location of her daughter’s presumed captor or captors.
The cold metal buildings are dark and messy, with leftover furnishings and many shattered display monitors. Navigating with her flashlight she finds a strange document that references a member of the research team having heard strange voices at some dig site. Not far from the note is an Ansible, but the lack of power in the building prevents it from functioning. Indra presses forward to find a way to switch the power back on in the next structure, then returns to the Ansible to inspect it for clues. A message awaits her on the screen letting her know of a hidden passageway nearby, she asks the sender for answers, but receives no response. With no choice but to continue, she heads off to find the new passageway.
The wall opens up like a mechanical door revealing a larger chamber that seems to house an industrial elevator of some kind. The only path is down, so Indra activates the switch to open the doors and steps inside to descend toward the unknown. The elevator shakes during the descent then strange glitches and jumbled pixels flash on the screen. When the doors open Indra is once again in the dark. Any possible reticence to continue her expedition alone is quashed by the now dysfunctional elevator denying her a return trip back to the surface.
This is where the adventure really starts, and many many surprises lay in store for Indra. Axiom Verge 2 feels somewhat like a homage to Alice in Wonderland as Indra rides a strange elevator to stranger environs. Much like Trace’s awakening in Sudra, Indra is spirited away to an unfamiliar new world filled with bizarre alien scenery and logic defying new science that is indistinguishable from magic. It is all very fantastical and all the components of art, writing, music and design coalesce effectively to immerse the player in their collective fantasia.
From the outset my curiosity was stimulated. I felt the strong pull of my desire to explore the new alien landscapes, to find and delve into the pages of history and unearth the narrative strokes they hid. It was not the same labyrinthine mesh of mostly indoor rooms that made up the majority of the first game. The world of Axiom Verge 2 feels sprawling and alive, with living animals and plant life abundant in its visible ecosystem. There are even other living people to talk to on this comfortably familiar earth-like planet, and they play a role in adding clarity to present circumstances.
One does not have to have played the original Axiom Verge to process the surface events of the story in Axiom Verge 2, but it certainly expands the experience. There is a lot of fun to be had in connecting dots and finding ways and places where the stories of the two games may converge in their lore. In my personal experience that is actually where most of the fun was found. The same ideas of extra-dimensional multiverse traversal, advanced nano-technology, technological immortality, transhumanism, and many others found in the first game exist in the sequel as well, although with new presentations and unique depictions.
As a story I can’t say Axiom Verge 2 made me feel anything. It’s like trope porn for science fiction fans, of which I am one, but ultimately it just felt like comfort food. Nothing wrong with comfort food though, and I was mostly satisfied with what I got. I felt the science fiction and fantasy blending of world building elements was very captivating, but Axiom Verge 2 is held back a very bland character story with shallow development. Indra wasn’t very likeable for me specifically because she is a rich CEO who is challenged to solve planetary scale crises as a champion of technology. I’m personally pretty tired of that archetype in real life so I am not actively seeking it in the fiction I consume. If you rewrote Axiom Verge 2 giving Indra a different, more interesting backstory I don’t think it would affect the story much whereas Trace’s background as a scientist felt more consequential in the first game. Still, there are some cool ideas and optional lore that more than make up for the plot’s weaker areas.
Gameplay
Before I jump into the gameplay I’d like to take a moment to commend Tom Happ for his inclusion of an accessibility menu containing customizable difficulty sliders as well as some other useful accessibility features. It could still be improved, but not enough games in this genre are taking accessibility seriously so it is great to see. I prefer these types of sliders to traditional difficulty presets because they put more trust in the hands of the player to control their own experience. Other developers should take note of this effort and endeavor to at least match Axiom Verge 2’s accessibility offerings.
So what is the gameplay like in Axiom Verge 2 and how does it differ from the first game? Well for starters there is a huge emphasis on melee combat that was non-existent in the original. There is also ranged combat in the form of boomerang weapons and a hacking ability that acts as a more targeted and complex replacement of the Address Disruptor. Hacking and some other special abilities are gated by a new secondary resource, and this is replenished at checkpoints as well as at some hackable vending machine like devices found out in the world.
There are a lot of ways to engage with enemies in Axiom Verge 2, and there doesn’t seem to be a wrong approach. Whether you want to go berserk with melee swings, first throw a range weapon to soften up the target for a melee finisher, dodge and weave ranged attacks, hack enemies to be friendly or more vulnerable, some combination of all of those, or simply run past nearly every threat, the choice is entirely up to you. I never felt demanded to use any particular ability or approach and virtually all of the encounters, including boss fights, are optional. Fighting with melee attacks on a slope can result in some frustrating missed attacks depending on enemy height so I guess maybe that counts as the game encouraging me to swap styles, but all you really have to do is take a few steps forward and then keep swinging.
You don’t have to worry about struggling much with the combat in this game, but if for some reason you did, there is also a lot of cheesy implementation of ranged attacks and enemy aggression. Enemies would just not respond to my damaging them with the boomerang which prompted me to stop using it very early on as to not completely disarm the limited challenge that existed in the game. You can also find skill points and additional weapons through exploration that further dull the already dulled edge of conceivable threat down to a smooth and harmless round.
Perhaps it could be said that this comparatively under-cooked combat just serves to accentuate the larger focus on exploration and spatial reasoning puzzles. Much of the real meat of the gameplay is not in the combat, but instead in wandering each environment searching for treasures and new paths forward. I found the game world generally pleasing to navigate, and some of the movement abilities made traversal very enjoyable as well. In some instances finding a new path felt like it provided a level of satisfaction I don’t often experience in this genre anymore. It was less “go here, use the new ability” and had more logic puzzle appeal to it, albeit nothing incredibly sophisticated. Still, the puzzles that did exist felt thoughtful and satisfying even in their simplicity.
While the game is easy the progression doesn’t feel hand-holdy. You are able to unlock some waypoints, but usually you won’t be able to just go straight to them and will have to explore more circuitous routes to your destination. A lot is left to the player’s own curiosity and drive to explore unseen parts of the map as well as their attention to environmental details to observe where secrets may be hidden and what abilities can be used to reach a new path. The game was at its most fun for me when I had no idea where to go next and was just navigating around available routes somewhat aimlessly aside from just wanting to see new sights. There were a lot of weird and cool sights to be seen.
Wishlist
This is the part of the article where I start talking about things I may have done differently, or features I would have liked to see added to the game. This section may make less sense if you haven’t already played the game, but it still may give you insight into aspects of the game that can inform your purchasing decisions.
Bosses could use some more passion and creativity in their designs (this is a long one, bear with me). I’ve read Happ isn’t so fond of bosses yet he has decided to include them in this game. If they are skippable why bother including them if they don’t offer much engaging content? If they are going to be included I would like to see them included more thoughtfully. Shouldn’t bosses at least offer something nice in gameplay for the people who choose not to skip them? Most of the bosses were easily overcome by mashing the attack button while face tanking or spamming one special ability a few times in a row. There was a huge math balance issue between boss health and player damage potential. They are extremely easy, have very uninteresting attack patterns, and don’t really add to the story or lore in a meaningful way. In my personal opinion it feels like the bosses exist just to say the option to skip bosses exists. I’d be totally fine with a combat-lite metroidvania experience that had 0 bosses and emphasized exploration more, but Axiom Verge 2 isn’t exactly that. It has a bunch of almost entirely meaningless character upgrades that imply a combat experience matters when the actual game design suggests the opposite. Axiom Verge 2 feels very confused over its own identity in this way. It leads to feeling like all the optional urns and skill points exist just to offer a shallow tick-the-boxes activity rather than to support a cohesive gameplay idea. I know this may sound harsh, but I did like the game despite this complaint. Axiom Verge 1 didn’t have the most difficult or complex combat either, but at least there was a sense of choreography in most of the boss fights. A dance of some kind usually had to take place to emerge victorious. I just hope if Tom Happ is going to add bosses and combat in Axiom Verge 3, he makes them something worth including or just leaves them on the cutting room floor.
I wish the base experience was more difficult. It had customizable difficulty, but was lacking enough challenge to make those options meaningful. This point is connected to the last point. As stated earlier I love the way this game includes an accessibility menu that lets you customize the math of the game in a way that is right for the individual player, and I don’t mind bosses being option or combat being minimal. That said, there was too much investment in providing ways to overcome a non-existent challenge. The accessibility menu would be more meaningful if it was a response to in-any-way difficult game design. It is a bias, but my personal philosophy on the topic is that games should be made challenging and then made accessible, in that order. If the game world is devoid of any real threat to the player, whether by enemies or even environmental hazards, there isn’t much inhibiting progress to begin with. It is different if a game doesn’t want to include action, but if a game does, that action should have stakes and consequences that feel like they matter. In my opinion this game did not have that.
Enemies should get aggressive when I damage them. Just another issue in enemy behavior and combat, but at least this one is easily fixed with a patch. The boomerang cheese feels kind of immersion breaking, causing the few enemies that do exist to feel more like non-responsive game objects than believable adversaries for me to face or feel threatened by. If they aren’t violent, make them run away. Some “enemies” that are violent don’t respond, and others that run away just move a tiny bit before becoming stationary again. Nothing feels sustained and instead gives the impression of incredibly simple interactions lacking in any complexity.
Even if none of these changes get made I still can appreciate the game for what it is. I just think it is important to talk about the things we’d like to see games do differently. To be critical of design elements, even in games we may enjoy, that we feel could have done better in our opinion. Axiom Verge 2 may not adopt any of these ideas, and that is okay, but maybe someone else who reads this will reflect on them when making design choices. Someone who is working on a game now, or will work on a game in the future. Presenting possible ideas and alternative ways of doing things has no downside.
Recommendation
Axiom Verge 2 is indisputably outside the shadow of Metroid that some say may have hung over the first game. It has carved out an identity all its own, and I really respect that. I just wish that new identity had a bit more polish and coherence. The exploration, puzzles, and traversal are satisfying enough to carry the more clunky, less inspired elements of the game’s design. If you liked the first game I can’t promise you’ll like this one, but I still encourage you to try it. If you didn’t like the first game I definitely encourage you to try this one as Axiom Verge 2 has something new to offer and is very distinct from its predecessor.
The low difficulty of this game actually makes it a very approachable jumping in point for the genre, and it should certainly be lauded for inclusion of some (could use more than just damage modification) accessibility options. Even if the base game is probably not demanding enough for them to see much usage. I thought the experience was cool, albeit rather disappointing compared to what my expectations were. Those expectations are my own fault, and I encourage Tom Happ to completely ignore all my complaints and keep just being himself rather than try to appease me. I’d rather more games be creative and disappoint me than be kind of fun but not take any creative risks with their design.
This review may have had some negativity toward the game, but I really am still interested to see what comes next for Axiom Verge. The jump from 1 to 2 proved that 3 could be anything. I’m still willing to pay another $20 for the next experience, but anyone put off by my critiques should probably wait for a sale or just pass on this one. If you’re looking for a more combat-rich metroidvania experience, this ain’t it. If you aren’t dissuaded, I hope you enjoy your journey through the mysterious, sometimes surreal world of Axiom Verge 2. Despite its subjective shortcomings, I certainly did.
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