Axe Cop

[b]The Good:[/b] As someone with no previous familiarity with the Axe Cop franchise, this game immediately grabbed me. Wacky characters and plot points are introduced with no warning, but it does it in a way that feels consistent with the rules of this whimsical universe, and by the end it goes to great lengths to connect all the dots. The faux-retro graphics are another reason I even looked at this game. The color palette most closely resembles that of the Game Boy Color, but the screen is wider, more colors are displayed at once, and sprites are larger and more animated. I assume the style is faithful to the webcomic and animated series, and it does look great. The turnbased combat system has several distinct characteristics that deserve thorough analysis. Enemy encounters aren't started at random, rather enemy sprites will spawn in and wander about and battle will only start if you make contact with them. Combat is turnbased, but far from generic. There's not a traditional Defend command, but instead you can Charge to replenish a fair amount of MP. Doing a regular Attack will replenish a small amount of MP. Other Moves may require to use of other items (fruits) instead of or in addition to MP. Some Moves may cost HP. Enemies may be considered Flying and can then only be hit with projectiles. Machine-type enemies may be Hacked for various effects. Then there's stealing items from enemies and learning their moves, and bosses with their own twisted rules you have to account for. Simply put, combat offers a lot of creative variety. Another factor to the balancing of combat is your stat gains on level up. In most RPGs, all your stats increase. In Axe Cop, you get to pick one stat to increase. On your next level up, the previous stat you chose only offers half of its value so as to entice you to spread your points around. Each party member has their own stat growth parameters, so they all retain their own role in the party . Later in the game you may find scrolls that let you increase the level gains either by giving a more even increase to all stats or by giving major increases to a character's main stats. The choice is yours. Furthermore, party members mainly learn new moves when certain stats reach a threshold. You can check that in the Fighter Moves section on your Cellphone, which unfortunately you don't have access to when you're assigning points after levelling up. The game also hides some stat-boosting vitamins, and I highly recommend holding on to those for characters who learn moves later into stats they get few points from. For instance, Fire Slicer needs a bunch of defense but only gets one point per level whereas a vitamin would give him five points. And you do want to teach every team member all their moves, because they get a big stat boost if you manage that. Of course, there's more to an RPG's gameplay than just the combat. After walking for a few steps, your character will start sprinting which will let you jump over gaps. Every team member has their own special field ability as well; Axe Cop can chop down obstacles, Fire Slicer can light up dark rooms, Sockarang can throw boomerangs to hit switches and grab items, Ralph Wrinkles can sniff out hidden secrets, etc. All of this lends itself to creative level layouts and a team with no weak links in it. [b]The Bad:[/b] Axe Cop does not employ a "less is more" mentality to its level design. While the game essentially is structured as an overworld and 8 separate dungeons or "cases", these worlds are so large that they require multiple checkpoints spread far apart. The worst of it is case 3, where you're going into a laboratory that is 10 floors deep. Each floor has several large rooms, and you have to go through all of them multiple times as you're searching for ways to open the color-coded doors on each floor until you can reach the very bottom. It's a massive place, and the appearance of the floors don't change enough that I could create a mental map. While the dungeon crawling does get broken up by a falling block puzzle when you unlock the color doors, the puzzles amount to minutes out of several hours spent in there. While I can praise the music and enemy designs, the gigantic levels do them no favors. During the 3-5 hours I spent on case 3, there were 4 different types of enemy I could find; the shark bat, bear crab, military grunt, and night monster. That's it. The cool features of the battle system lose all ability to impress or entertain when you fight the same battles a hundred times over. Also, the random encounters do not have their own fight music. You just keep hearing the dungeon music loop forever and on and on. Case 2, while a dramatic increase in scale from the introductory case, at least had two different pieces of music for indoors and outdoors, and a slight change in which enemies were available. Case 3 and its eye-searing neon pink tiles may be where players drop off, I fear. That would be a shame, because it gets better from there and case 4 felt especially short and sweet. Some of the puzzles also suffer from bloat. One example is in case 7, where you have to solve a 7x7 puzzle where every piece has at most three shades of blue and one shade of yellow. The finished image is visible if you inspect a picture on the wall, but you have to push several puzzle pieces away to reach it and you may not even see it in the sea of blue you're in. This puzzle would be easy if you could click and drag pieces around, but we are confined to our grid-based movement and our player character occupies physical space in this cramped room where you can only push and drag individual blocks. It took me no less than an hour to solve it. Another example is between cases 7 & 8, you're in a big open environment with no enemies and you're collecting 160 bees that are spread out all over. Why does there have to be so many bees? One positive I mentioned was that each character has a way of interacting with the environment that's unique to them. From the beginning Axe Cop is joined by Flute Cop, and he can play a song at bear statues scattered across all worlds. Playing the song will trigger a change in the map, unique to each location. This flute ability is retained when Flute Cop turns into Avocado Soldier before case 2, and by case 4 he can turn into Ghost Cop to play the flute to go into the Ghost World. This is all fine, and the game teaches you to treat the bear statue as a cue to bring in Flute Cop, whatever form he is in. That works until case 7 where my problem lies. In order to make progress I had to play a song to the bear statue not as Flute Cop, but as Sockarang. Sockarang learns to play the guitar at the end of case 2, but in the next case the party is split up so he's absent, and in case 4 we're introduced to Ghost Cop's interactions with the statues. Before chapter 7 Sockarang was never called upon to play, but he was repeatedly brought in to throw his boomerangs. In other words, the game does a terrible job at teaching you a mechanic, doesn't make use of it for 15 hours, and then expects you to remember it. If not for the developer's Let's Play, I would never have figured out what to do. [b]The Verdict:[/b] All of my praise is painted in broad strokes that encompass the whole game, whereas my complaints are a lot more granular and nitpicky. What I see as a flaw in pacing feels like it comes from a place of love for the project and wanting to provide as much content as possible. The game feels massive and dense, telling a comprehensive and complete story in some 20-30 hours. And that's not accounting for all the optional content, which includes battle gauntlets, optional bosses, hidden collectibles, learning secret moves, and more. I would highly recommend this to any fan of turnbased RPGs and/or retro gamers in general. While the ride wasn't always smooth, I was here for a wild one and it did deliver. This is unambiguously the best 2020 Steam game I've played.

I loved reading axe cop back in the day and now i can play it as an RPG. Some cool things: You start running when you hold down a direction key and it feels awesome, sure beats walking. You start hopping over platforms when you start running. That's awesome too Some not cool things: I either haven't found it or there's no place to fully heal your party. You have to buy healing items. Good news is there's an abundance of these and i have yet to run out... But i guess it's because Axe cop never sleeps? IDK I'm liking it so far and if you like the comics and RPGs with your favorite characters, get this.

When the story is taken with the understanding that an older brother is drawing and interpreting his younger brother's imagination, this game becomes utterly hilarious! Great game and the humor of one of the Babylon Bee staff is really shown through in this!

Don't be fooled by the low price and 8-bit graphics into thinking this is a short, low-effort hack job; this game is an absolute GEM that has heart and soul poured into every facet of it, and it's patently obvious once you play it. Basically, most of this game is a RPG similar to that of Dragon Quest titles, but there's several differences that really make it better overall. Each character has their own unique ability that can help unlock new areas of the various dungeons to you, in a manner similar to the LEGO games. When you level up, you pick which stat of your character to level up, not the game. Special moves are unlocked when certain stats reach certain levels, and the game will usually tell you what those levels are. The game is incredibly well-balanced; my main issue with a lot of RPGs is that much of the game will be fair but then bosses will be ridiculously difficult, but that is not the case here if you are reasonably prepared. Sure, there's been some uber-difficult content added post-release for some real die-hards, but it's all optional-- the difficulty for the main story is juuuust right. And what a story it is. If you're unfamiliar with Axe Cop, it was fairly popular in the early 2010s as an absurdist comic strip where the writing was done almost entirely by a (then) 5-year-old boy and drawn by his much-older brother, Ethan Nicolle. Add in all the ridiculous plot devices and logic you would use if you were a 5-year-old boy playing with toys, and you get some semblance of the tone of the story. At first this game feels like it's merely retreading Axe Cop's "greatest hits" from the comic strip, but as you progress you'll see there's more going on here than meets the eye, with a great send-off for the series at the end (the comics themselves sputtered off around 2017 as Malachai Nicolle, the author, grew up). Basically every character even briefly in the Axe Cop comics is here in some form or another-- it's clear Red Triangle Games is a super-fan of the series. If you want to see a full, detailed review, see my review on Christ Centered Gamer here: [url=https://www.christcenteredgamer.com/reviews/pc-mac/7688-axe-cop-pc]https://www.christcenteredgamer.com/reviews/pc-mac/7688-axe-cop-pc[/url] So, to recap: Great, balanced gameplay. Great music. Great story. TONS of content and secrets to find, and they're freaking everywhere. Only a few very small, niggling downsides (like no map). This game is an AMAZING deal for the price. See the number of hours I've played? And I STILL have several achievements/secrets to unlock. One of the best true "indie" games I've played, hands down. It's a crime this game isn't considerably more popular than it is. If you're considering this enough where you're reading reviews, BUY IT. One of the best uses of $10 ever.

5/10 really needs voice acting, even if it is just for special moves and like 3 scenes also all the steam achievements are broken...

As far as licensed games go, Axe Cop is a clear example of a licensed game that fully grasps the spirit of the property it's adapting. What at first seems like a beat-for-beat retelling of the Axe Cop webcomics and printed books unravels into a game-original story which always stays true to the tone of the original works by the Nicolle brothers. For fans of the Axe Cop series, there are dozens upon dozens of familiar characters to interact with. Characters from every era of the comic are featured in the game; 10 as permanent party members, over 30 as boss battles and many more still as interactive NPCs with unique dialogue portraits modeled after the comics. The gameplay takes the form of turn-based JRPG combat, with free selection of party configuration and level-up growths making playthroughs of the game very customizable. The highlights are the many boss battles found within the stages and in the arenas. I'd heartily recommend this game to fans of the Axe Cop franchise and people who want to play a game inspired by classic JRPGs with a totally off-the-wall setting. The game is fully accessible to both fans of Axe Cop and total newcomers, featuring a full in-game encyclopedia on all named characters from the comic.

Retro fun, with lemon! If you're an Axe Cop fan (or at the very least not a bad guy) I'm sure you'll love reliving his insane exploits by playing them yourself.

While this is a very unique RPG based on a webcomic, and some things are well-thought-out to make it stand out from the crowd, it unfortunately has too many "nope" moments that will inevitably drive away some of the people who purchase this game especially when it comes to directions in a few locations. I counted at least 5 myself, and basically decided I'm not going to even bother finishing a playthrough. Doesn't help that a lot of obscure stuff does not have any way for you to (both internally in the game and externally in the web) figure out, meaning that if you get stuck your best bet is to look for the developer's playthrough on youtube, but that also will not cover everything you might want to know especially involving side activities/sub-quests. Also, I have a feeling that the developers didn't really account for player choice involving a lot of matters which might screw over some players, particularly party composition and levelling up choices, meaning that you can get stuck in a perpetual grinding machine for XP and levels without some means to meaningfully improve your situation. Add to the fact that there are missable achievements (and I suspect some really awkward bugs, I can't remember one I had but I remember that it really annoyed me when that happened) and this game takes a nosedive to my recommendation. In case you DO decide to get this RPG I recommend you grow tolerance for 10 second loops of music driving you mad, pick out the "CORRECT" optimal party, invest the in the specific stats the developers intended at the right time (yes, ordering will matter for unlocking moves and stuff), grow some patience about every sticking point and stomach it all. Oh, and there's a section where you must "sokoban" a 7x7 puzzle into the correct pattern while accounting for the space to move all of the pieces without entraping yourself. ...Other than all of that, great RPG. Axe Cop is funny and interesting. Still won't recommend. And no: I did not finish the game, I stopped on the last leg of the game where you're in the world of swords or whatever.

This game is not good game. This is not good way to get the story of axe cop. Just go read axe cop, you'll get the same stories at a faster pace.

Very fun and good. If you like oldey-time JRPG games, this is like those, but hilarious.