Recent reviews by Feauce

Another dev that is more interested in Patreon money than properly finishing their game. I'll be avoiding GeeSeki like the plague from now on.

Capcom added post-launch DRM that is not listed on the store page. Avoid buying or reinstalling this title unless this is changed.

Can't really suggest the game in its current state, for as much as I enjoy mech games this one has many issues.

- Opens VR for no discernible reason on launch, with no settings to disable this behavior.
- The gameplay is a lot more like Valkyria Chronicles than Front Mission. Enemies will shoot you as you move on your turn, but your units do not do the same during enemy turns.
- Movement is highly imprecise and at odds with the turn-based pacing.
- Attack ranges aren't made very clear which, along with the movement, undermines the tactical combat.
- Enemies that drop loot do so on the battle map, further undermining the turn-based tactical style.
- Missile weapons have no way to cancel once you start targeting, unlike other weapon types. (Probably a bug, not intentional design, but one that's still present.)

It looks promising, but Dual Gear feels like it can't decide whether it wants to be an action-style mech game or a tactical one. There's also been a lack of significant patches since EA release, so when the eventual full release happens could be several years or never at this rate. One to watch, as it will hopefully improve, but right now I wouldn't say that it's worth picking up. Maybe on a 60%+ sale, but certainly not at full price.

I've tried multiple times to get into this game, but Fort Joy drains all of its namesake out of the experience for me. I don't care if there's nigh-invincible Lone Wolf builds and mechanical cheese that makes it easy. I wanted to play through with a normal party, playing with normal mechanics, to see more of the game at once and to enjoy the interactions between characters. I don't care if the game gets good 15+ hours in if I'm having so little fun even getting there that I don't ever want to play it again.

All you need to know: A side story boss fight was literally designed to be impossible to win, due to the boss's infinite stealth which breaks target lock and drones constantly healing their ship. There is no way to disable their stealth, and no way to destroy the drones. The advice from the developer was to screw with the difficulty settings to make it slightly less impossible.

Constantly crashing on start-up. Completely unplayable.

When I first started playing, upon the character leaving their house for the first time the game crashed so hard my computer's video also crashed into a max-brightness state that I had to reboot to recover from, even after closing the game. The game will randomly freeze during play; the visuals stop updating while the underlying engine is still running. I can hear music and the menu sound effects when I blindly press buttons, and the mouse cursor appears and moves, though it's impossible to see what I'm interacting with.

I searched online for others with similar issues and found that this has been a problem since release, apparently is an issue with high server load, and the people posting about this issue on the official SubReddit either get ignored or told to reinstall, update video drivers, and other such "have you turned it off/on"-level suggestions.

I'm requesting a refund because of this. I was honestly having fun with it in the brief time between the initial crash and the freezing started, but I have no plans to come back to it later, and I will advise everyone I know that plays these kinds of games to avoid this one. It has been several months since Early Access launch and the multiple stress tests in January, and if they can't maintain server stability or keep up with the growing player base during Early Access, why should I believe for a second that they can do the same after full release?

I will not be recommending or purchasing any Total War games since Creative Assembly saw fit to take Epic's exclusivity money.

Creative Assembly has taken Epic's exclusivity money. I will therefore never recommend or buy their products again.

Playing on Normal difficulty for a first run, and really trying to find stuff to like about it. I just can't. The list of weapons is way too large, and aside from a couple of standouts (Kilver and Voranj), most feel basically useless instead of being an up- or sidegrade. The novelty of the lab coat, drone, and glitching enemies and the environment are cool, but that's not nearly enough to carry the whole experience.

It's way too linear for a game trying so hard to be Metroid. The bosses are punishingly difficult purely for the sake of being difficult, with bullet hell used in place of good encounter design. Most bosses do have a trick to them that makes the fight easier, but this ranges from marginally helpful to feeling like an unintended exploit that totally defangs any threat the boss would otherwise present (Telal and Uruku in particular). Enemy damage is way too high for the Metroid comparison as well, particularly in the early areas before you start finding health upgrades.

This is the one thing Axiom Verge successfully replicates from the bygone era it's trying to be: the demands of flawless execution. However, this serves only to create a sort of mindless busy work that's a test of one's tolerance for such archaic quarter-milking arcade design far more than any test of real skill. The "git gud, scrub" crowd will likely scoff at that last bit, but even Dark Souls isn't as punishingly hard as its reputation would imply. What Dark Souls has that Axiom Verge absolutely lacks is twofold.

First is an actual difficulty progression. None of the boss mechanics are tricky to understand, and they pretty much follow set patterns. This doesn't work in the game's favor, though, and instead of dreading maybe a couple of fights (Capra Demon, Four Kings), Axiom Verge leaves one dreading every single boss fight, knowing it's going to be nothing more than a time sink of a grind, with absolutely no other progress to be made until you clear it.

Second, while Dark Souls will often reward inventive gameplay, with multiple ways of clearing most encounters, including the bosses, and both it and Metroid sport a progressively opening map with ways to break the typical sequence of progression, this is not the case in Axiom Verge. Bosses have one viable standard strategy, and even though each typically has an exploit strategy as well, this winds up feeling cheap and unfulfilling rather than rewarding clever play. Exploration upgrades allow you to go to only specific areas. Combinations or alternate uses that would be built-in and discoverable in similar games, or can be replicated (such as Super Metroid's Spring Ball vs Bomb Jump), are explicitly separated here.

In short, Axiom Verge is a visually nice game that has a couple of interesting ideas, but ultimately tries so desperately to be a nostalgic retro title that it winds up bringing some of the worst aspects of a previous gaming era forward instead.