681st played so far
Genre: Shoot ‘Em Up
Platform: SNES
Year of Release: 1992
Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
Here’s another random shooter drawn from the virtual bucket. I genuinely struggle to differentiate these most of the time. This one comes from the stable of Gradius and Salamander, which I struggled to introduce last time. Here we go again for what might be more of the same.
Our Thoughts
Listening to podcasts earlier this week, I heard some stories on how we don’t have the time to really learn games anymore – because there is so much more choice, a game has to have a lot of promise if you’re spending hours or days to get really good at them to progress. For me, these shooters are one of the places where this really shows. The arcade shooters tend to have the advantage that I can turn on unlimited lives and such, giving me more progress for a while, but I don’t have that advantage with a console shooter. With those, it becomes exhausting and difficult – too much for me, really, and that shows on Axelay.
The game itself is a fine shooter, helped by a decent selection of weapons. One of them in particular was helpful – changing the angle of fire based on how long you press the button, which helps with sweeps around the screen.
The graphics make good use of the SNES’s parallax options, creating a decent sense of depth – one that works well for the game, and that the game was clearly optimized for.
Final Thoughts
Axelay is a standard shooter. It’s tough, and because of the difficulty I didn’t get as much out of the game as I otherwise could have. It’s fine, really.