Akimbot takes influences from the past, but they probably should have stayed there
Back in October of 2020, Nicolas Meyssonnier released the game Pumpkin Jack, a throwback to Medievil from the Playstation 1 era. It wore its heart on its sleeve for that franchise, not doing anything new but doing it well, and with love. Now, Meyssonnier is back with a newly founded studio to continue paying homage to the games they loved while growing up. In the case of Akimbot, it’s inspired by Ratchet & Clank and Jak II. I have a soft place in my heart for the 3D Action Platformers that Akimbot tries to capture, so I enthusiastically took on the task of reviewing Evil Raptor’s newest game. Does Akimbot capture the essence of some of the best that the PS2 had to offer, or was my enthusiasm misplaced?
To answer that I need to briefly discuss why Pumpkin Jack worked so well. It understood both the flaws and weaknesses of Medievil. It may have offered a fairly simple and straightforward experience but it was fun because we picked up a new weapon every level that added some variety to the mix, and it didn’t overstay its welcome with annoying padding. Pumpkin Jack was the quintessential pick-up-and-play game for those who loved what it was emulating from their past, but with all the Quality of Life enhancements we have come to expect in modern games.
Akimbot, on the other hand, feels like everything they learned while making Pumpkin Jack was flushed down the toilet and forgotten. I have hardly anything good to say about it except it has a decent presentation and that we can parry projectiles back at enemies with our melee attack. This game has everything from both the original Ratchet and Jak games, but with all their weaknesses intact.
The game has a great visual aesthetic, but the plot itself is barebones and predictable, with some very annoying characters, our titular heroes Exe and Shipset being the prime offenders. Akimbot decided to replicate the edginess of Ratchet in his original outing, but taking it to the extreme. There’s some character development by the end to mitigate this, but it was too little too late for what I had to put up with. When tasked with saving the universe so that life will remain, he’s told he’ll be rewarded with money, fame, and his crimes being pardoned; but he whines that he still hasn’t heard a good reason for helping, which is one example of many. Shipset is literally if the rodent Daxter was replaced in Clank’s body, but was annoying instead of being funny.
We get to jump and double jump by swinging our sword, and even dashing midair for further distance, but it all controls horribly; dashing midair is so wonky it results in a 50/50 chance it doesn’t end in disaster, and there are many times that we’ll try to land on an obvious platform but the physics bounce off into an instant death type of hazard. I’ve never had such frustration with wall running in a platformer game; later in the game we have to shoot an icon mid jump to activate the next wall, but quite often the gun just wouldn’t fire.
The melee and ranged combat serves no better. The only time I used melee was to parry back an incoming energy blast, but usually this would result in failure because we face off so many enemies at once there’s bound to be unavoidable damage. In the games Akimbot is drawing inspiration from, movement is key to survival. But in Akimbot it’s suicide, because a cavalcade of enemies can spawn around us, and when they do their projectile weapons have already shot halfway towards our characters. It’s a very common occurrence to have them spawn and immediately die a few seconds later. I found the only good strategy to success was to hide behind cover and jump up and take pot shots before I landed, which is not any fun at all.
This is compounded by the fact that the weapons we use suck in general, with terrible aiming mechanics; part of this is because the character is so off center from the camera and crosshair, getting a good idea of where we are aiming is chaotically disorienting. There are four main weapons and four special weapons to get throughout the game. We unlock the primary weapons organically throughout the game, while the supers are bought at merchants found in each level; these are upgradable, but we can’t max out all of them in the game, and with no New Game+ we never can. None of the weapons are especially fun and each has annoying quirks on top of the aiming issue, an example being the sniper and rocket launcher’s fairly aggressive knockback to our character, which will even shove us to the right or left on random occasions.
The level design itself feels like an extended mini-golf course, just going straight and avoiding redundant obstacles that break the pacing. Every level has something akin to lasers or fire jets to dodge, or wait to turn off before proceeding; a few times these obstacles would take around ten seconds before I could continue. There are also many on-rails segments, like flying in a starship or a buggy, but the camera angle and visual clutter on screen results in cheap difficulty. Akimbot also has mandatory hacking terminals, where each one is a little mini game in itself ranging from classic Snake to three-card-monte. They’re no fun and penalize us too much for failing, taking a significant amount of health away.
I wish I would’ve come out of Akimbot with a glowing recommendation, but nothing could be further from the truth. Not only was my enthusiasm misplaced, I learned that enthusiasm is probably overrated.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher.
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