Battle Axe (2021)

 

Battle Axe is the Kickstarted brainchild of Henk Nieborg, who wanted to create a game inspired by Gauntlet, Golden Axe, Knights of the Round, and Capcom's Dungeons & Dragons games. The game itself doesn't explain much of a story (not a big deal), but the Kickstarter campaign outlines a Seven Samurai-like scenario in which an evil sorceress sends her orks out from their northern wastelands every seven years to round up new slaves. The player chooses from a selection of three heroes who have answered the pleas for help from the populace: a red-haired pirate who lugs a cannon on his shoulder, a dark elf woman who wields twin blades, and an old wizard.

Nieborg got his start in the early 90s, coming out of the German demoscene and doing graphics for Thalion, working on Ghost Battle, Lionheart, and Ambermoon. After Thalion dissolved, Nieborg's art showed up most prominently in The Misadventures of Flink and the Lemmings spin-off, The Adventures of Lomax. His pixel art stands out especially for its verdant colors and details. He's hung around the industry and has worked in 3D, but with the resurrection of pixel art in indie games, there's now an opening for him to be appreciated for his art in ways that weren't there before. Lots of games feature pixel art, much of it well-done, but there's a repetitiveness to a lot of it, as if the creators were all imitating or taking their lessons from the same sources. Nieborg is an original with his own style. He's one of those sources that the newer developers are aping, much like how many fantasy artists take cues from Frazetta but rarely get the sense of color and mood that Frazetta was so great at.

So Battle Axe is a very nice-looking game. It's on the cartoony side but only just so. It's not meant to be really heavy in terms of mood. A recurring aspect of the four levels is that the action mostly happens on a floating plane, so a bit of parallax scrolling can happen in the background despite the overhead view. Nieborg chose to base the game's resolution on the Sega Megadrive, but it looks more advanced than what a real 16-bit console could do, more like something that would have been released for the Neo Geo. It really does feel like a long-lost Neo Geo game, albeit one with music by Manami Matsumae, who worked on Capcom games like Magic Sword.

In terms of how it plays, Battle Axe does play a bit like Gauntlet in the way it involves monster generators that have to be wrecked, but what it most reminds me of is a fantasy take on Shocktroopers (see? Just like a Neo Geo game). It's fast-moving and quite challenging even on the easy setting. It's easy to get tripped up on traps, especially since the view is a bit more zoomed in than in Gauntlet. The screen can get a little busy at times, somewhat obscuring the gameplay, but it's doesn't cross the line into feeling unfair (contrast with Xeno Crisis, a game Nieborg didn't design but contributed graphics to. A decent but often frustrating experience). Each character has melee or ranged attacks and a rechargeable special move. The game has attracted some criticism for its short length (only about 30 minutes to complete), but that ignores that the game's difficulty will require most players to spend some hours learning the stage design and monster placement and figuring out which characters are most agreeable to their style. There are no continues - you have to finish it in one shot, die and you have to restart. The game is relatively expensive for an indie production, though, and it's advisable to wait for a sale on it.