Retro Metroidvania adventure Axiom Verge gets a PS4 release date
Vita version to follow.
Axiom Verge - the Metroid-inspired adventure backed by former Nintendo indie game chief Dan Adelman - is coming to PS4 on 1st April for €17.99, developer Tom Happ has announced.
As detailed on the PlayStation Blog, Happ noted that the game is entirely complete and through certification on PS4, but it's only the Vita version that is taking longer. "People who are mostly interested in the PS Vita version should not worry. It's definitely coming, and it's definitely going to be Cross-Buy," he stated. "So if you buy it on PS4, it will be ready for download on your Vita as soon as it launches there."
So if it's already completed on PS4, why won't it be out for another month plus? This buffer period is so reviewers won't be rushed going through the ambitious, secret-filled adventure. "There's a lot of content in Axiom Verge and I want to make sure reviewers have plenty of time to play through the entire game and savour the full experience," Happ explained. "I'm personally really proud of what I've been able to accomplish as a solo dev, so my emotions run the gamut between excitement about letting the rest of the world check it out, and anxiety over letting my baby take its first steps in the wild."
Indeed Axiom Verge does sound as if its exploration runs rather deep. Power-ups start fairly banal and include things like drills and suped up beams that can shatter bits of the level geometry, but they only get increasingly complex from there.
An "Address Disrupter" makes it seem as if the game itself is glitching and will have various effects on different objects and enemies. "I came up with this idea from the days of my youth playing with things like Game Genie or just finding glitches that weren't originally intended to be in the game. I found it fascinating to uncover areas that I was never intended to see and corrupt different elements of the game to see how they would behave," Happ said. "I wanted to replicate this feeling of discovery by creating a sort of glitch ray that would corrupt the reality around you. Every enemy can be glitched, and they all respond in different ways. This opens up a lot of new puzzle ideas for people to explore by glitching every enemy to see what it does."
