Top shelf arcade aesthetics put together by a true connoisseur of the era, with pixel art by truly an all-time great and music almost as good. On every level this game captures classic arcade aesthetics complete with cheesy attract mode videos, splash screens, and pacing... It nails everything except, well... the gameplay. The gameplay is truly tragic.
The screen is too enamored with the art (I would be too). It is far too zoomed in for the action. Your dodge move throws you constantly off the screen in the direction you dodged. The time I got a game over dodging into an enemy off screen for the camera to slowly pan up and reveal my corpse felt like I was made the punchline of a truly bad joke. Even if the camera worked, the combat doesn't. The enemies have an absurd level of skill in sneaking up in blindspots where your melee and ranged attacks don't want to hit and clocking you upside the head. The effective hurtboxes of your attacks are just not generous enough for a game this cramped and intent on killing you, not to mention the sheer amount of enemies, especially at stage 3, that can just threaten the entire screen 0.25 seconds after you see them, one of which is ALSO immune to your ranged attacks. The fire wave traps in stage 3 are absurd especially since if you treat them like the stage 2 fire traps, you will eat a hit every time. At no point in my time playing this game have I felt like I received a slightly interesting challenge and almost every time I eat a hit it is because I got surprised by something that showed up from off screen and attacked with almost no windup. That's the only trick this game has. (Well that and some little thing approaches you but your melee/ranged attack somehow misses.)
This is all nitpickery but it's a 30 minute long arcade game of four stages that doesn't offer score extends, midlevel healing worth a damn, or continues. You MUST play to a high level of skill to see the end credits and so I absolutely CANNOT forgive the bullshit because the game forces me to eat every single bite of it, no compromises. I would not mind the length at all if it were fair. I've paid far more than this for Metal Slug games over the years, and most of those I am nowhere CLOSE to 1ccing (Most of them are bullshit after MS1 too but there you can credit feed and they're still more sporting than Battle Axe). You can say mad because bad if you like* but I know what an honest game looks like and this is not it.
Battle Axe is so close to greatness but at the same time is so far. Everyone else is saying "It's too short, wait for a sale" but I don't think this is worth any price. Even if you get the 50% off you're getting an arcade game you still are not going to ever clear. There is nothing on Steam that can compete with this pixel art, yes, but there's just so much on Steam that can outshine this in the realm of 30-60 minute arcade game played for skill it's not even funny.
*(I've seen the cheevo completion rates. Before you say mad because bad, you SURE you wanna risk it?)
