Recent reviews by Volcynika

A very chill game with the only failure having to just climb a hill again. Enjoyed playing on the Steam Deck and meeting all the weird little guys!

Great game that's easy to play at your own pace. The main notes

-Works great on the Steam Deck
-Allows you to save literally anywhere, which makes pick up and play very easy (and while some battles can be a bit drawn out pending on your party/skill selection, it is turn based so easy to take breaks there as well).
-You'll hear the same music a fair amount of times, but I enjoyed most of the themes, mileage may vary
-The class system with passives / skill selection gives you a lot of freedom with how you specialize particular characters, especially with upgrades found throughout the game.

Just a bite-sized RPG (compared to bigger budget productions) that is very much worth your time.

For reference to how much of the game I completed, this was going through all difficulty layers and achieving the true ending (took 15 runs), unlocking most of the achievements (minus some more specialized ones), and spent around ~21 hours.

Overall, I think the game's structure / loop is one of the more enjoyable roguelikes I've played in a while. In terms of the core loop, some people like to say it's more Megaman adjacent, but I'd go a step further and say it's closer to something like 20XX or 30XX, where upon completing levels, the game essentially ratchets up the difficulty of everything after it, so you really do have to be mindful of the order of bosses you fight depending on your loadout at the time. So if you enjoy the loop of "beat game, make game harder, repeat" is appealing, I'd highly recommend it.

For a more bullet point list of my thoughts over the hours I played.

Good

- I appreciate the variability of weapons, as well as being able to customize your loadout to adapt to new weapons. You have particular skills you carry across on your primary/secondary/ability weapons, and building your character to focus on very particular effects per weapon gave a lot of options.

- The synergy of the attributes/skills flowed well too. I didn't feel constrained heavily in how I designed a particular set of skills for my core abilities, and I was able to make it where "if I do [x], then I get [y], which also assists [z]" and such to make my options for fights generally work the same way.

- The story was fine, if a bit easy to guess at the surprises you learn over time, but I did enjoy the banter between the overlords and Ada. The dialogue has some funny writing, especially when you involve some of the later story developments. Volt Colossus is top tier goofy robot.

- Liked the artstyle as well as every particular enemy has a very well defined shape, so even from a distance you know exactly what route of attack they're going to make as well as how to manage/prioritize them. When you get swarmed by many enemies, it helps prevent things from being too chaotic/overwhelming.

- It lets you take breaks per floor / at the stage selection screen, which is greatly appreciated! I've seen a handful of this type of game not have smooth breakpoints, where they think runs won't be too long or can't quite work in the functionality. Runs of this game probably take around an hour-ish I think, but love having the choice to break at a good cutoff point, even if floors themselves may be long (and you do lose your progress in a floor if you break early).

- While the game does have some pretty difficult modifiers needing to be used to see the true ending, I am glad there is the option for those having trouble to enable a mode that raises your damage resistance (with no penalties) so it gives everyone at least a leg up to see the story they have to offer. There's no scoring in the main game (that's only for daily challenges which are separate), so happy they are giving opportunities for people who have issues with some of the challenges.

- Very few bugs. I only encountered very minor issues in the bug department (dialogue did not show for one part, and I could not open an optional treasure chest), but it was very stable and had no crashes.

- The shotgun weapon is great! I loaded that thing up with every element and blasted enemies in the face, it was my trusty sidekick on the path to victory.

OK / Some Issues

- Soundtrack of the game is a good listen, but the default balancing of it compared to the sound effects/action of a combat room was a bit off. My bouts with the last boss were a cacophony of shooting/skill use/dashing, but whenever that track was able to get past all that noise, it goes hard. But yeah, you're mostly going to hear mostly everything but the music.

- Cutscenes! There's a lot of little short ones. There are ones of seeing the towers, picking stage, leaving and entering a floor, and then the boss introductions. After the first few runs, I'd honestly wish I could skip the interstitial scenes and just maybe stick around for the boss dialogue scenes. While you can skip them by holding down a button, I'd appreciate turning them off and just being a longer loading screen at some point. Not a huge nitpick, but definitely something that could be updated for people who put a lot of time into the game.

- Randomness of the game can only go so far as to how many room setups the developers are able to create, which I have no trouble with, but it can be annoying when you just don't get an item on the list of unlocks. There was a weapon which the game told me to keep searching in the hideout, but as I combed every room on each run, it just never appeared. I'm a bit of a completionist with some limits, but the dicerolls just not going my way that many times was annoying. Fortunately it was just one case of that, otherwise I unlocked basically everything else.

To give a more succinct version of the above, I think in what is a sea of roguelikes the past few years, this is an excellent game worth a look. Punch robots and have a good time.

This game is definitely for the sickos (complimentary) in regards to the people who really want a challenge, though I am not sure I am up to the task. I was able to finish the Arcade difficulty of the game and felt pretty good to get that far (which included some of the extra boss phases available with overkill). Works great on the Steam Deck as well, was glad to be able to pick up and play for trying a new level or difficulty. The only thing I didn't really jive with is the music, it's fine for what it is, but nothing super memorable overall. Looking over the forums and update history, the developer has been responsive and adding in new features like training, which helps with easing a player in (especially for some of the boss patterns). Definitely check it out if you've enjoyed games like Zero Ranger or Star of Providence.

This is coming from the experience of playing this game 100% on the Steam Deck, making it to the second part of the game.

As far as things I did enjoy

-The game runs great on the deck, battery life was fine even on default settings.

-The idea of making dioramas was a unique approach and it was a bit wild to imagine how many hours of work they did to achieve that.

-The option to have a set of music from Final Fantasy games gave battles an extra oomph to hear themes I enjoyed from times past.

-Battle system, at least regarding bosses, with the idea of emphasizing strategy over just being able to over-level and overpower them was appreciated. It was a nice touch to have attacks that pierce as well as arcing other attacks.

-Story was fine if a bit predictable for the main plot beats I experienced.

For things I had issue with that, combined together, ultimately made me not want to continue

-The dioramas are a neat idea, but the way the camera shifts as you explore areas at times felt extremely disorienting. Also being unaware how the perspective would change had me sometimes running the opposite direction whenever I went to a different area in the map.

-The game's soundtrack I just felt was fairly mediocre. The main battle themes are nothing memorable, and at least the option of other game's battle tracks at least gave me some better music to listen to with the game's many battles.

-Eventually the game essentially puts its thumb on the scale and emphasizes that you cannot grind your way to victory over a boss, that your experience will be noticeably decreased if you aren't fighting enemies higher than your level. I'm completely fine with that as an idea to actually make use of skills/equipment/strategy, to a point. Unfortunately, it does nothing to mitigate the fact that it combines the idea of a high encounter rate and slow battles, that you either have the option to fight/flee lots of small battles, or end up fighting potentially a long battle in the Dimengeon that may give you almost nothing worthwhile in terms of experience. It would be manageable if the battles moved faster, but they are anything but (especially when the buffs and such have to cycle in Dimengeon battles) and there is no way to heavily increase the speed, like even other games that are not remasters/remakes provide. There being no easy way to be like "OK these battles will do nothing for me, can I lower the encounter rate or just stop battling altogether in this area" is absurd when it just doesn't feel worth the time wasted on it.

Even as a person big into RPGs, I just couldn't bring myself to really keep going with the game. This was brought from another platform for an 'enhanced' release, but quality of life options like increasing game speed greatly (especially for 'trash' battles) and even skipping cutscenes (because some bosses require some rethinking, but you can only just watch the cutscene play a bit faster with no direct skip) are just absent. I can see why some people enjoy the bosses requiring appropriate planning and thinking, I just don't want to deal with a game that feels very antagonistic against the player. It trying to "evoke" older games with its slower approach is not an excuse for me, especially in a time we have the ability to make adjustments that do not affect gameplay but help the audience have a way to enjoy the game.

Loved the game and enjoyed my time with the cast, here's a quick list of notes after sitting it with a bit-

-Writing and characters are great, made sure to listen to all the VA they recorded.
-Runs well on Steam Deck, played exclusively on it.
-Enjoy the open world structure at your leisure, but don't be like me and try to get everything immediately. Upgrades and new features make the process simpler and more manageable.
-Music is great, but unlike Paradise Killer, not able to change to different tracks at your leisure (saw it was a feature intended, but not able to happen). Soundtrack is at least available on Steam and other services.
-Getting around is a blast once you've got all the fun upgrades for the truck, the fact you can't get penalized / destroyed doing wacky things is part of the fun.
-Was able to 100% the game in ~15 hours, so at least for me, it is on the short and sweet side.

Hope to see Kaizen Game Works do more in the future, though with the jump from Paradise Killer to this, I have no clue what would be their next surprise.

Coming from the position of completing all levels and goals entirely on Steam Deck (18.5 hours Steam time), I want to first say that Axyz is a great puzzler worth your time. I became engrossed in it over a weekend and didn't want to let up until I saw all it had to offer. Bought it on a whim since I saw a mention of it online, and I am very glad I did.

The Great

-Gameplay - Love getting around levels and figuring out where I can and need to go with looking up/down to see what paths are available to me. Enjoyed planning routes in my head for specific goals, and I almost actually had to get a notepad for myself to jot down things and try to look over the harder levels outside of the game. I do wish that there was some kind of UI option to have an icon of where the exit is at times though, definitely had more than one instance of not knowing where I needed to go once I collected everything.

-Difficulty - As someone who does have some difficulty with spatial awareness, this game never felt like an insurmountable difficulty at any point. The game getting more challenging / introducing more mechanics over time felt natural, and I never felt overwhelmed. Developer has also made it much quicker to retry levels which helped when I was stuck on some particularly tough challenges. Really enjoyed some of the more "interesting" bonus levels, where some of them are definitely "developer wants to have a fun with mechanics / ideas." There are very few levels which lock you out of getting everything at all times, but the ones that do are very compact and easy to retry.

-Developer Response Time - Developer is quick to respond with help and assist with any bugs/issues. I had a small one around some score issues, and they fixed it pretty quickly! They've also added additional highlighting

The Ok

-Music - Soundtrack was fine (with some tracks I enjoyed more/less than others), but I usually kept the volume pretty low.

-Sticking to the vibes - The game is presented as looking at disks on an old PC, and it hits the atmosphere it is aiming to achieve. Just sometimes I wanted to jump to a different set of levels quickly and the menu transition takes a little more time than I'd like to get around.

The Not So Great

-Slightly Inconsistent block behavior - Some of the later block types (specifically the fire block), I felt like I never had a true handle on how its behavior worked. At times I feel like I had multiple instances where even if I did the same movement, I would get different results. I don't believe there was a tutorial for this block type, but I wish there was a slight bit more of indication of the limits of how to approach it.

As you can see, had a great time with only a few small issues with the game, so it definitely is a great recommendation if puzzles you have to tackle from all angles sound like a good time!

Going to go ahead and add to the list of people saying those that are fans of Ace Attorney should definitely give this a look. Characters are fun and the gambling mechanic is a great theme for the courtroom drama, deciding how much you want to push your luck. Since you can check out the prologue chapter for free, it is a well-fleshed out episode that you can judge whether you're intrigued by the premise and the characters. Some of the conversations definitely have some game/meme references, but not enough to be exhausting. I really wonder how they're going to wrap things up what's been told so far.

Had a fun time with this game, it definitely is more on the side of an "easier" metroidvania game, but still fun with the great look Team Ladybug is known for. I would only advise at least to be mindful of there being no auto-save, because sometimes I go off and make a bunch of progress, only to take an unexpected death, which definitely hurt my momentum a little bit. So while you can lessen back-tracking due to a specific ability, be sure to run to a save point every now and then!

Very much a short and sweet game and it works fantastic on the Steam Deck.

Just re-emphasizing that XEECEE does fantastic work accompanied by great music that keeps me wanting to see what happens next, but I also hate having to wait for the next volume. Great follow up to volume 1, with more of the characters you love/hate (though I hope no one hates Darcy).