Axe Cop videogame console review

Axe Cop: the videogame is an incredible, if flawed, experience that’s flown under the radar far too long. I’m frankly amazed at how well it ties together its themes, mechanics, and many disparate influences to function as an adaptation. I don’t even know how much of this is intentional, but the more I dug into the game the more I found a depth that I found I had been seeking for some time. This turn based RPG parody adventure is the only game adaptation of the Axe Cop webcomic, which has also seen a 2 season Adult Swim series, premised on the stream of consciousness story of its 5 year old author. Its console port comes five years after the PC release, and I’m so glad the game made its way to me after all this time.

This game came at a perfect time for me. With a son on the way, I just completed Expedition 33, something that gave me complicated, morose feelings. Axe Cop presented an opportunity for another look on boyhood, and the uncoordinated possibility of imagination. I was not daunted by the somewhat silly premise: the way big budget RPGs are written nowadays, even a 5 year old with severe brain damage would be a more capable, mature writer.

Axe Cop takes a while before its real strengths hit you, but it did end up addressing many problems I have with the turn based genre...sometimes. There are some weaknesses, and there is some jank, but this wears off as the game goes along and the strengths become more consistent. At the start, you’re swept along by its immediate and shameless energy. Following elements of the comic, it introduces a Unicorn Baby, dinosaurs with explosives, and other vagaries one after the other. At first I was concerned that they wouldn’t be able to pull this together into a coherent story, but the strange influences do converge as the game goes along.

The game appears to be a slight upgrade of the old NES RPGs. Your party can have up to 4 characters in any battle, though you’ll find many more throughout the game. Enemies have weaknesses and resistances, and many ways to alter their stats. Your characters have similar capabilities, but few of them. Each of them also has a field exploration ability: Axe Cop can cut down obstacles, Bat Warthogman has a grappling hook, and Vampire Wolfer can transport into a werewolf to climb special obstacles. The game includes no equipment, but it does have consumable and stat boosting items which demand careful attention.

Gaining new abilities sometimes comes from in-game events or secrets, but mostly comes in with the levelling system. At each level up, you can choose to boost one stat. The longer it’s been since you boosted a stat, the higher you can level it. This way, you’ll want to jump around stats to maximize the best ones, but also to seek abilities. Never told to you directly, but in a few menu options is the location where you can see these prerequisites. It’s a little annoying that you can’t see them at the time you level up, but this does encourage some planning and paying attention to your characters. This is far more interesting than Sea of Stars or Kingdoms of the Dump, which also give you a choice of stat to upgrade, but without connecting it to any other benefit or plan.

That menu issue is one of a few…many places where the game feels its influences in NES games. The game has a fair bit of jank and inconvenience. Its classic chiptune songs are usually short and don’t change when you enter a battle, so you are doomed to tire of them if you don’t change the audio. There is a bug opening menus where it defaults to accepting the first option. This makes changing characters and many menus a pain, because you’ll have to back out a step or two to get what you want. It’s far worse in a hacking minigame, where it triggers all of your bombs at the start, giving you none to use later in the game. This has also force triggered a warp to another location, having to load and reload new levels.

The game has no dash button, but an option in the menu for how long after you start moving for the dash to kick in. This is supremely annoying, as many sections of the platforming and exploration require you to be sprinting, so you can easily end up trapped on a platform moving back and forth hoping the sprint kicks in. The worst is in the one of many stealth sections, where lights have gone out and your vision is limited. In these sections you can’t really see where you’re going or how fast you’re going, and a single mistake kicks you to the start of the room. It’s bad, but it is manageable and later sections offer some assistance in the form of an expensive item.

The game ostensibly has no random encounters, but the many monsters wandering around narrow corridors would beg to differ. You can kite some of them, but inevitably you will find yourselves tearing through waves of trash mobs.

One of the levels features a croquet game where the controls are a little awkward but usable. The game would be fun but the AI is so terrible there's no challenge at all. It leaves both of you to just flail incompetently. The balls have a tendency to get stuck on the wickets, which is a problem because you keep aiming at them trying to win.

I’m not going to list every one of these issues, but suffice it to say they were numerous. I would clip half a pixel too far and be unable to access doors and been frustrated, but none of these issues actually got me to walk away. For a while there, I thought I wouldn’t like this game. I’ve come across other strange, seemingly obtuse games and I worried this would be too broken to compel. That’s not the experience I ended up having, though.

For one, none of the bugs were bad enough to actually make the experience unplayable. They were navigable and sometimes frustrating, but in another way they added to the game’s entire vibe. It’s like a more developed Space Funeral, taking on Axe Cop as a way to deliver the best elements of NES RPGs, without their worst. The game’s occasional awkwardness hearkened back to my early days playing Dragon Warrior, but with new depth and fewer time-wasting. The game’s only guide is the creator's Youtube playthrough, but that tool does exist if you get lost. You likely will, as the game has chunks of time devoted to you searching through prior levels with new exploration abilities.

The game also does have enough strategy going on to make for a compelling RPG. For a game with relatively low damage levels, the resistances and abilities you find along the way make a huge difference. Changing Accuracy, using the occasional stat rest item, and buying the right consumables can totally alter the trajectory of a fight. The Hacking ability with special effects on certain robots, the Sniffing ability that tells you an enemy’s HP, the poop throwing ability which I still don’t fully understand, offer real options that you may need to take seriously.

This is especially important because of the lack of something with precisely this weight of game. The actual NES games I’ve played are too tedious and buggy for their own good. As much as I love its fever dream energy, the original Mother is just an unbalanced, obtuse pain. Final Fantasy I’s spells were often nonfunctional, and Dragon Warrior joined both games with random encounter rates that were abysmal. Axe Cop is less throwback and more straight evolution. I have some real love for 8-Bit Adventures 2. I think that game has some better overall writing and presentation than Axe Cop, but Axe Cop beats it on the feeling of exploration. Herein are found some real puzzles in the odd dungeons and the combat encounters themselves. For something that appears to tout old architecture, the game brings along a ton of fun with shootemup sections, an arena, and satisfying exploration without becoming obtuse.

Axe Cop is relatively cheap, and won’t outstay its welcome at about 23 hours of playtime. Its frustrations do add up over time, and may fix more problems than they solve, but the game that results is easily recommendable to fans of the genre.

After this whirlwind of an experience, I'm sad to see that Red Triangle Games has never attempted another JRPG. With the lessons from this game and a the right story, a sophomore turn based game could be truly exceptional. I see the team has more and broader interests, branching out into point and click adventures and arcade style games. While those are safely outside of my areas of interest, I will definitely keep an eye on their work in the future.