Club Nintendo

[KLXVER]

mZuzek said:

KLXVER said:

Sounds like you just had a bad experience with it. That's fine. I disagree with what you say about it though(except the gameplay which is great). The level design is excellent. Story and characters are cool. Music is great. It does take a while to get all your upgrades, but that kept me hooked. Looking for the tools to keep going is fun. I don't get frustrated by stuff like that. It makes you think outside the box. If you get stuck, its your own fault. I beat the game in about 13 hours I think. Got stuck a few times, but figured it out eventually. The boss fights are big and epic as well. The game is actually a challenge. I felt great after figuring out how to move on and eventually beating it. 

And this game is made by 1 guy. Its amazing imo. So yeah, it rivals Super Metroid any day of the week.

I don't blame myself for that one time where I got this power to go through walls, which led me straight into another roadblock (getting roadblocked right after getting a new power-up, seriously? but anyway...) involving the Disruptor. And here I thought I could just use my Disruptor and get past it, but nah. Just nope, wouldn't work. So I kept exploring, and after a good while I found a Disruptor power-up that allowed it to handle bigger disrupted thingies! I thought "yeah, now I can finally go across that one roadblock!!" so I go straight for it, and guess what? Nope, still doesn't work.

That's bullshit level design. It's designed around roadblocks and not around an interesting game. Axiom Verge is a game of keys and keyholes, and it does everything it can to make you believe certain keys will open the roadblocks they don't. You know why Super Metroid is a masterpiece? Because it never blocks you from progressing after you get a power-up and the whole world is built in a very intuitive way that subtly guides you where to go next. Because most of the roadblocks (except colored doors, which aren't confusing because they use different colors you know) are tangible and natural, so you understand exactly what you need to go through some place most of the time, and if you don't understand, you will understand the moment you get that power-up.

But most of all, because Super Metroid isn't just about keys and keyholes, it's also about having a deep and interesting playable character who can perform a lot of different moves and skills regardless of which items you acquired. It isn't about finding Item A to open Door A and Item B to open Door B. If you know how, you can get through a lot of things in different and unexpected ways - and I'm sure Axiom Verge with its "speedrun mode" (ugh, the cringe) also has this, but the difference once again is, in Super Metroid it's intuitive. The game subtly teaches you how to walljump and how to shinespark, and it never expects you to put that into use in any particular way - they're just extra skills that you can use however you want and they feel like natural parts of your skillset because the level design is rarely built upon the use of these specific things. In fact, there are a lot of items in Super Metroid that have alternate uses or just interesting things you can do with, like the bomb spread or using the grapple beam as a weapon (it's pretty decent actually) or using all your missiles and power bombs to do a crystal flash or doing a pseudo-screw attack with the charge beam. The items aren't supposed to be just about unlocking a certain door, they're about expanding your possibilities. Axiom Verge doesn't get that.

Well if you cant get past a roadblock after getting a power up you thought would work, then you obviously haven't explored other options. That's the same way in Metroid. You think you have the right power up, but it turns out you don't and have to explore more of the map to find the right one. That happened to me a lot in Metroid: Samus Returns. A lot of going back to the same areas and trying whatever new thing I had just acquired, only to get the right power up very late in the game. I still absolutely loved it though.

If you don't like it that's fine, but to say the game is terrible is a bit much.