The most infuriatingly frustrating experiences usually come from games that do a lot of things right, but have some significant flaw that looks surmountable initially, and only prove to be fatal after the player spends hours trying to overcome it. For me, several metroidvania games eventually fall into this category, and much to my disappointment, Axiom Verge 2 is one of them.
The first game is a bit of a cult classic with its distinct visual style and unusual choice of mechanics - it's one of the rare sort of metroidvania that uses shooter combat instead of the standard sword-and-(techno)sorcery. The second game maintains the visual style, adds an even better soundtrack, but reverts the combat to melee-and-not-much-more. It was shocking enough in itself - however, what really put me off was that the game is full of fast moving enemies, against which the combat toolkit feels woefully inadequate. Fast movement helps somewhat - and then the game introduces the one feature I really didn't like in AV1: the grappling hook, which works even more haphazardly than it did in the first game. At that point, after a brief and unheroic struggle, I had to resign myself to giving up on the game. I'm really sad about this, but when a game doesn't feel fun, it's best not to play it...

This is a good metroidvanai, although I didn't like it as well as the first game.

Excellent metroidvania, clearly borrows from Metroid but evolves the gameplay into it's own thing. Really enjoyed my time with this game.