It has been a general rule for me for a long time that I don’t typically buy games the week they release. I made exceptions for more tent pole releases that I was particularly fond of (your Halos and Mass Effects), but generally I pick games up weeks (or months) after they’ve released when they go on sale, or when I know for sure they’re games worth getting. Since I started frequenting this site, I’ve found it easier to pick things up closer to their release dates, as Quick Looks tend to make it much easier for me to immediately get a sense of how the game is.

This is all a roundabout way of saying that both Axiom Verge and NOT A HERO released this week on the PC and I picked them up immediately. Here’s what I thought about them, complete with terrible headlines:

Axiom Verge puts the Metroid in Metroidvania

This doesn’t actually count as a “new release” I guess, because it’s been out on the PS4 for like a month or so at this point, but apart from dicking around in the demo in a Best Buy I’d had no real exposure to it. I do not own a PS4 (in spite of the constant pleas of my friends to buy one), so the release of Axiom Verge on the PC made this an easy buy for me.

I never actually played Super Metroid on the SNES, although I did play an emulated copy in high school and really enjoy it (I also owned Metroid Fusion and was a pretty big fan of that too), which is about as close as I can come to describing the sort of game Axiom Verge is. The whole exploration/find weapons to unlock other areas/fight weirdly organic-looking creatures is all there, and the game controls super-well. I’ve spent maybe an hour with it so far (I just got the disrupter), and it plays really well. The soundtrack is also delightful, with a thumping bass line that gets in your head and, at least in my case, had me actually moving and shooting to the beat on several occasions (possibly I’ve been playing too much Crypt of the Necrodancer).

There are a generous amount of save rooms, which is another one of those things which, as a shitty game-player, I appreciate. The boss fights have been somewhat underwhelming thus far, but I’m having enough fun exploring the world and seeing what can and can not be hacked or whatever that I really enjoy it. The story so far is… interesting, at least, although a bit thin (even from an environmental storytelling standpoint). We’ll see how much more I put into this—I’ll probably beat it? I don’t know. I like it.

NOT A HERO is Not a Bad Game

More accurately, NOT A HERO is a fucking joy, and not just because you can run around murdering people as an angry Welsh woman (although that helps considerably). I’ve been of the opinion in the last few years that Devolver Digital can damn near do no wrong when it comes to picking games to publish, and the Roll 7 guys already won my heart forever with OlliOlli, so on the strength of that alone I was willing to drop a tenner on the thing. That the game’s sense of humor manages to walk the increasingly fine line of LOLSORANDUM and just straight-up black humor helps considerably. Bunnylord might be my favorite character in years, if only because his increasingly bizarre ways of expressing his excitement are stupendous (also his thoughts on children are a delight).

The fact that it plays remarkably like OlliOlli helps a shocking amount (not in a control scheme way, but in an...overall feeling sort of way, if that makes sense). The quick restarts and challenges keep me going back, and the minimal pixel look they’ve gone with works really well (I guess I’m not completely fucking sick of that look yet). I hear it’s coming out on the Vita and damn if I probably won’t pick it up there too when it releases. I had some time to kill last night while waiting to leave and see Mad Max (you should all go see Mad Max, it’s fucking stupendous), and I quickly lost an hour to playing through the first block of missions and unlocking the irate Welsh lady. Fuck this game is good.

Oh and the soundtrack is also really quite stupendous.

Also this trailer is a work of fucking art.

I picked up a few other games which happened to be on sale (Skullgirls (shouts out to @grandcurator, who messaged me about that deal) and Double Dragon Neon), but I haven’t had time to sit down and play through those. I’ll have some thoughts on Skullgirls by next week, I think, when I’ll put up the next installment in Let’s You and Me Fight, unless something else catches my eye.