izigame.me

See full video review here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFEa2XTe_b4
---------------
TL;DW - The foundation is there, but not much else. Basically just a less robust version of Enter the Gungeon ATM
---------------
Transcript:
I love roguelites. They’ve been my standby game for years when I’m not sure what to play, with Gungeon being my absolute favorite. So when AK-solotl caught my eye I was immediately intrigued. Running around as a gung-ho amphibian mowing through hoards of cutesy creatures while caring for your own pasture of baby Axolotls sounded like a formula for success that I was on-board with. Well now it’s finally here and… it’s not very good.
The gameplay is solid: The guns feel good to shoot, the movement is precise and satisfying to weave through the several bullet hells you’re faced with, it’s a game where any veteran of twin-stick shooters will feel right at home with. The presentation is charmingly goofy from the nurturing animations for your baby axolotls to the boss-kill screens that get a smirk from me because of how unapologetically stupid they are - I mean, look at this. And the music is great with its doom-inspired tracks that never overstay their welcome. But that’s about where my praise ends… The game tries to capitalize on the popularity of meta-progression in the genre thanks to games like Hades, Cult of the Lamb, and so on, but falls short in nearly every department that a roguelite needs to shine. Normally I wouldn’t care that much, not every game’s a winner, but the on the Steam Store page it’s description opens with “AK-xolotl is the ultimate top-down roguelite shooter” which is a bigger lie than when I tell myself at night that I’m going to the gym tomorrow.
Let’s start with the weapons and items. Aside from your starter weapon, there are only SIX weapons from the outset. Yes… SIX. You’re likely to see the entire starting arsenal just within your first run. It’s been awhile since the first time I played Gungeon but I’m pretty sure I saw more than SIX guns in my first run in that game. This is only made worse by the fact that the method by which you unlock more guns doesn’t even open up until you reach a certain point in the game. You’re stuck with these basic-ass guns for the better part of 90 minutes. And even after you unlock the shop, the options for new guns are just slight variations of the six guns you start with. A stronger sniper rifle, a burst fire assault rifle, dual pistols. They’re just… so bland. It’s just a shame we have this fun, imaginative setting and our gun options feel ripped from your typical “Call-of-Duty: Shoot-a-mans”. A lot of the time these guns aren’t even better than your starting weapon. I’ve had better results just using the starting sniper rifle almost exclusively which is kind of antithetical for this genre where using a bunch of different guns is kind of the point. The items fare a bit better with a pool of 17 at the start (although two of them are just reskins of the same item and one is just a bag with money in it) and range the gamut from your typical damage boosts to ones that increase fire-rate at the cost of damage, to leaving trails of fire, and so on. I didn’t feel particularly enticed to pick anything other than flat damage boosts and health-ups for a couple of reasons, though: One being that many of the items are not particularly useful, such as the boots that make you immune to the easily avoidable floor traps, the helmet that makes you immune to explosions for like, the two or three enemies that can even cause them, and this beer item that is supposedly legendary that made my gun so useless that it single-handedly sabotaged my run. And speaking of enemies… here’s all of them. They’re lacking in variety, and some of them have behaviors that can only be described as… frustrating, like these foxes who constantly run away from you or this bear that almost NEVER, STOPS, SHOOTING. These encounters exacerbate the problem with the lack of weapon variety by discouraging the use of the shorter range weapons given that you can only carry TWO GUNS. The reason for this is apparently to “ the gameplay fresh” with frequent weapon drops. In practice, I just keep getting the same guns over and over, so no I wouldn’t say my experience stayed fresh. Oh, also, there isn’t any alternative bosses for each floor, you’re gonna be fighting the same ones every time. Most of the variety comes from the roster of Axolotls you’ll accumulate over your runs, and with that, though, comes probably the worst part of this game: Metaprogression

The metaprogression in this game is simply not great. As stated earlier, the accumulation of new weapons and items is slow to not only become available but slow to acquire the currency needed to unlock weapons and items that are less than stellar. This leaves Axolotls as the main cornerstone of the game’s progression. During runs you’ll occasionally find these rooms with an egg in them where you’ll capture and send a baby axolotl back to the game’s hub. You “nurture” them by simply interacting with them a certain number of times until they grow into being teens, you feed them a meal, and they become a playable character. You can assign them several classes and abilities by feeding them different food, which sounds great on paper, but in practice it’s… pretty underwhelming. The seven classes available differ in very inconsequential ways, with each only having small changes in speed or health with maybe a passive that is also less than game-changing, like doing more damage at low health, slightly more currency drops, and so on. The abilities don’t fair much better, with the only one I found worth using being the healing ability because… there’s very little opportunity to heal otherwise. Besides these tea rooms that only appear with certain unlocks, there are next to no random health drops like in nearly every other roguelite in existence. This leads to the axolotl’s essentially just being alternative skins that hardly play different from one another in any meaningful way. But here’s the kicker: you can sacrifice the affection your baby axolotls have accumulated in order to buy permanent buffs. There’s no limit to how many times you can do this and you still keep the babies in the process, so as I quickly figured out, I could simply start a run, die, sacrifice their affection, and repeat until I had enough currency to buy all of the buffs available. The game REWARDS you for not only purposefully dying, but also actively avoiding its core unique progression mechanic in favor of a less interesting but ultimately more useful permanent buff shop. It’s a complete mess.
The game simply doesn’t know what it wants to be. It wants to have the chaotic run variety of games like Enter the Gungeon as well as the extensive metaprogression of Cult of the Lamb and it succeeds in neither. It claims to be “The Ultimate Top-down roguelite shooter” while only having a fraction of the content of its contemporaries while in some cases costing more than them. I didn’t even get to the weird interactions I’ve had with enemies bugging out or the time I died to LITERALLY NOTHING, and other small bugs and details that further weigh the experience down. I know there is a roadmap of future updates for the game, but this isn’t an Early Access title, this is the 1.0 release of the game, and I’m going to judge it as such. All that being said, I do hope the developers are able to make meaningful improvements because they seem very passionate about this project and I want to see them succeed. I DO see potential here, and I DO like the ideas they are going for. I wouldn’t bother going through the effort of making this video if I didn’t think they were onto something here, but for now, I can’t recommend this game. Mainly because it doesn’t have fishing in it yet and, c’mon, that’s the MAIN content of these games let’s be real.