See full video review here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFEa2XTe_b4

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TL;DW - The foundation is there, but not much else. Basically just a less robust version of Enter the Gungeon ATM

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Transcript:

I love roguelites. They’ve been my standby game for years when I’m not sure what to play, with Gungeon being my absolute favorite. So when AK-solotl caught my eye I was immediately intrigued. Running around as a gung-ho amphibian mowing through hoards of cutesy creatures while caring for your own pasture of baby Axolotls sounded like a formula for success that I was on-board with. Well now it’s finally here and… it’s not very good.

The gameplay is solid: The guns feel good to shoot, the movement is precise and satisfying to weave through the several bullet hells you’re faced with, it’s a game where any veteran of twin-stick shooters will feel right at home with. The presentation is charmingly goofy from the nurturing animations for your baby axolotls to the boss-kill screens that get a smirk from me because of how unapologetically stupid they are - I mean, look at this. And the music is great with its doom-inspired tracks that never overstay their welcome. But that’s about where my praise ends… The game tries to capitalize on the popularity of meta-progression in the genre thanks to games like Hades, Cult of the Lamb, and so on, but falls short in nearly every department that a roguelite needs to shine. Normally I wouldn’t care that much, not every game’s a winner, but the on the Steam Store page it’s description opens with “AK-xolotl is the ultimate top-down roguelite shooter” which is a bigger lie than when I tell myself at night that I’m going to the gym tomorrow.

Let’s start with the weapons and items. Aside from your starter weapon, there are only SIX weapons from the outset. Yes… SIX. You’re likely to see the entire starting arsenal just within your first run. It’s been awhile since the first time I played Gungeon but I’m pretty sure I saw more than SIX guns in my first run in that game. This is only made worse by the fact that the method by which you unlock more guns doesn’t even open up until you reach a certain point in the game. You’re stuck with these basic-ass guns for the better part of 90 minutes. And even after you unlock the shop, the options for new guns are just slight variations of the six guns you start with. A stronger sniper rifle, a burst fire assault rifle, dual pistols. They’re just… so bland. It’s just a shame we have this fun, imaginative setting and our gun options feel ripped from your typical “Call-of-Duty: Shoot-a-mans”. A lot of the time these guns aren’t even better than your starting weapon. I’ve had better results just using the starting sniper rifle almost exclusively which is kind of antithetical for this genre where using a bunch of different guns is kind of the point. The items fare a bit better with a pool of 17 at the start (although two of them are just reskins of the same item and one is just a bag with money in it) and range the gamut from your typical damage boosts to ones that increase fire-rate at the cost of damage, to leaving trails of fire, and so on. I didn’t feel particularly enticed to pick anything other than flat damage boosts and health-ups for a couple of reasons, though: One being that many of the items are not particularly useful, such as the boots that make you immune to the easily avoidable floor traps, the helmet that makes you immune to explosions for like, the two or three enemies that can even cause them, and this beer item that is supposedly legendary that made my gun so useless that it single-handedly sabotaged my run. And speaking of enemies… here’s all of them. They’re lacking in variety, and some of them have behaviors that can only be described as… frustrating, like these foxes who constantly run away from you or this bear that almost NEVER, STOPS, SHOOTING. These encounters exacerbate the problem with the lack of weapon variety by discouraging the use of the shorter range weapons given that you can only carry TWO GUNS. The reason for this is apparently to “[keep] the gameplay fresh” with frequent weapon drops. In practice, I just keep getting the same guns over and over, so no I wouldn’t say my experience stayed fresh. Oh, also, there isn’t any alternative bosses for each floor, you’re gonna be fighting the same ones every time. Most of the variety comes from the roster of Axolotls you’ll accumulate over your runs, and with that, though, comes probably the worst part of this game: Metaprogression


The metaprogression in this game is simply not great. As stated earlier, the accumulation of new weapons and items is slow to not only become available but slow to acquire the currency needed to unlock weapons and items that are less than stellar. This leaves Axolotls as the main cornerstone of the game’s progression. During runs you’ll occasionally find these rooms with an egg in them where you’ll capture and send a baby axolotl back to the game’s hub. You “nurture” them by simply interacting with them a certain number of times until they grow into being teens, you feed them a meal, and they become a playable character. You can assign them several classes and abilities by feeding them different food, which sounds great on paper, but in practice it’s… pretty underwhelming. The seven classes available differ in very inconsequential ways, with each only having small changes in speed or health with maybe a passive that is also less than game-changing, like doing more damage at low health, slightly more currency drops, and so on. The abilities don’t fair much better, with the only one I found worth using being the healing ability because… there’s very little opportunity to heal otherwise. Besides these tea rooms that only appear with certain unlocks, there are next to no random health drops like in nearly every other roguelite in existence. This leads to the axolotl’s essentially just being alternative skins that hardly play different from one another in any meaningful way. But here’s the kicker: you can sacrifice the affection your baby axolotls have accumulated in order to buy permanent buffs. There’s no limit to how many times you can do this and you still keep the babies in the process, so as I quickly figured out, I could simply start a run, die, sacrifice their affection, and repeat until I had enough currency to buy all of the buffs available. The game REWARDS you for not only purposefully dying, but also actively avoiding its core unique progression mechanic in favor of a less interesting but ultimately more useful permanent buff shop. It’s a complete mess.

The game simply doesn’t know what it wants to be. It wants to have the chaotic run variety of games like Enter the Gungeon as well as the extensive metaprogression of Cult of the Lamb and it succeeds in neither. It claims to be “The Ultimate Top-down roguelite shooter” while only having a fraction of the content of its contemporaries while in some cases costing more than them. I didn’t even get to the weird interactions I’ve had with enemies bugging out or the time I died to LITERALLY NOTHING, and other small bugs and details that further weigh the experience down. I know there is a roadmap of future updates for the game, but this isn’t an Early Access title, this is the 1.0 release of the game, and I’m going to judge it as such. All that being said, I do hope the developers are able to make meaningful improvements because they seem very passionate about this project and I want to see them succeed. I DO see potential here, and I DO like the ideas they are going for. I wouldn’t bother going through the effort of making this video if I didn’t think they were onto something here, but for now, I can’t recommend this game. Mainly because it doesn’t have fishing in it yet and, c’mon, that’s the MAIN content of these games let’s be real.

TLDR: The game is extremely underwhelming, and I highly advise against it, but it does have high potential. You start out great, but after 2 hours, you notice how poorly it's been designed. 3/10. - Conclusion at the end.

The game itself is fun, but there is absolutely no replayability as of now.
Let's start with the new player experience you have when starting the game:

When you start the game, there are like 6–10 (blue) items, which is the highest rarity you can find yet, besides a single (boring) yellow one. These items do nothing for your build. There is no impactful item that changes your playstyle or experience. Just to list a few and give you an idea of what they do:
When you walk, there is fire behind you (it doesn't work on rolls and disappears so quickly that I don't even know how much damage it deals after picking it 6 times)
When you walk, there is tar behind you (same thing here, but I don't even know if it slows or whatever).
You deal 40% LESS damage but have 60% more firerate (items that come with an inbuilt nerf are really frequent).
A bag that gives you money
A magnet that deals AoE when enemies are nearby (does VERY little damage at all).
etc. - you get the idea. The items are very stale and don't change your build.

There are items later on that do change your playstyle a little bit, like "bullets can destroy enemy bullets" but that's about as "intense" as it gets. Fun fact on this upgrade: Your shots also get destroyed on impact, so unless you have a massive firerate (on top of already firing an SMG), you might be struggling to kill mobs, which shoot extremely frequently, like the minigun bear.

There are about 6 secondary weapons that you have access to early on. I can't even say much about them because they're all so simplistic and uninspired. The "Carbine" as an AR with low firerate, the "pew-pewer" as a tommygun that does low damage with a high firerate and the possibility to shoot twice. The sniper works like a sniper, there is no grenade launcher, no RPG. Yet again, nothing cool or worthwhile.

Weapons are boring. Items are boring, so let's go to the class design. Maybe this is cool? Right?

Well. There are 7 "Classes", 7 "Abilities" and 8 "Specializations." All of these are crafted through "food" you find in-game. This food can be given to the baby Axolotls you can find in the dungeon, so to sum things up: Find axolotls, give them food and custom-craft your class, ability and specialization.

As soon as you find enough materials, you are able to cook a class or an ability. These use the same currency.
2 out of the 7 classes need materials from stage 5 (the last one), which you most likely won't reach easily, so let's count them out for now (these are the most interesting ones, of course).
2 out of the 5 leftover classes don't have any passives. They only dictate your HP, "Shield" (which works like soulhearts from Isaac) and movement speed.

To sum things up, there are 3 "easily" accessible classes that you can choose from, and the starter class is objectively the best one, which you, of course, already started out with.

The abilities are extremely weird. The one you start with (the heal) is probably the single best one. The others are a deployable decoy, the ability to destroy all existing bullets, invulnerability for a few seconds, a weapon drop, an instant kill of everything existing in a room (including you) with a 50% chance that you survive, and a random item drop.

Abilities can be used in about 2–4 rooms, depending on your weapon. So these aren't particularly important, but they are definitely really boring and uninspired.

The specialization is the lamest one out of them all, though. You can pick whether you deal 10% more damage with snipers, shotguns, pistols, SMGs, etc. and make them drop more often. So you can pick which weapon type you prefer through this. Nothing else.

The combination that really irks me about this is how you select your own Axolotl, though. Any Axolotl you can find has a unique and very cool design, but they don't have a single unique thing about them. Maybe you run a skull axolotl or a banana axolotl, but in the end, it only matters which class, ability, and specialization you've fed them. There is nothing defining about any of them.

So as far as we can tell now, the new player experience is really repetitive, but it also doesn't get a lot better.

Some items and weapons you unlock are definitely more special or unique (about 15%), but the progression is painfully slow. After killing a single boss, you gain about six diamonds. 30 diamonds are needed for unlocking a single "yellow" (or legendary) item. 40 for a weapon. There is no other item or weapon progression besides buying them for diamonds. There is no achievement for killing certain bosses or hidden features that give you special stuff. You buy it, or the experience stays the same.

The fact that weapon unlocks and item unlocks share the same currency (which is already fairly hard to come by) also doesn't help with this.

We've covered every single progression system in the game now, besides the hearts, which is also trash but by far the best one.

Whenever you find an axolotl, you need to nurture it after a run. And while these minigames look really cute, they do get extremely tedious after a while. Whenever you nurture an axolotl, they gain a heart up to a maximum of 3. After reaching 3, you can either suck the happiness out of them (yes, really) or make them into a grown-up Axolotl, which you could now feed with classes, etc., and play.

What I want to touch on is the "sucking the happiness out of them" part, because this is necessary for the "heart system". You need to nurture axolotls so that you can suck the happiness out of them (which results in them being unplayable until you've made them into adults), so that you can pick up these crucial power-ups. You basically have to choose "which Axolotl is the ugliest, so I don't want them to grow up".

These power-ups are extremely crucial because they:
increase your primary weapon damage by 20%.
decrease your reload duration by 30%.
makes you drop weapons 10% more often.
etc.—they're powerful.

So with this awful system, you basically have to pick which Axolotl you want to play and which one you bully regularly to get as many hearts as possible.

There are some other tiny pet peeves, like mobs having unlimited range with shotguns and alike, while you don't or mobs flying out of map, so you have to wait +15 seconds for them to come back and be killable again (seagulls), but whatever.

Conclusion:
The progression is awful, the items are extraordinarily boring and have no impact on your playstyle, the starter items are insanely repetitive, and the whole "unlocking new Axolotls" feature is really bland and basically baits you into believing the game has depth, which it definitely does not.

Overall, a 3/10, in my opinion. I could see the game reaching heights of up to 8/10 in a couple of years, but as far as I can tell, the game bets on "memeability", "cuteness," and the graphics instead of actually enjoyable content, so I'm quite pessimistic about it.

Is this game a masterpiece? No, but it is still good and there can never be too many good roguelike twin-stick shooters. I actually thought I'd played every animal in my 40+ year gaming career, but I don't think I've ever played an axolotl. These amphibians, which originate from a volcanic basin in Mexico and are also known as the Mexican caudal amphibian, have a fascinating characteristic - they can completely regrow severed limbs or even organs. There is no other animal with this ability to regenerate.

In the game, we take on an axolotl armed with a Kalashnikov (AK-47), hence the name AK-xolotl. The gameplay is easy to explain, it's a roguelike twin-stick shooter. You control your character with the left stick while firing the Kalashnikov (and other weapons) at your enemies with the right stick. Eliminate all the enemies in a room and move on to the next randomly generated room. If you fail in the hail of enemy bullets, you start all over again, albeit possibly with minor improvements.

The background story is simply explained. Your children have been kidnapped (not so bad), and your food supplies have been looted (no way!) - so you set off through several biomes to get the food back and perhaps free the children too. The ammunition for your standard weapon is unlimited, but a magazine only holds 30 rounds, so you will have to reload frequently. You can pick up a second weapon (with limited ammunition) and switch between the two at any time. You can jump over small chasms and use a special ability. As soon as you have disposed of all the enemies in a room, a crate with various resources will appear and the exits will open. The exits are marked with a symbol that shows you what you can expect to find in the next room. This could be money (tortilla chips), a new weapon, a merchant, a baby or a teahouse (for healing). Your initially completely empty base (the hub) will be populated by more and more stores as the game progresses. A place to raise babies, a cooking pot, a merchant with a few items, a windy guy who sells you permanent upgrades, a place to view your high scores...

What are the special features of AK-xolotl? That would be your babies. First you have to find them during the game, then they appear in your base. There you feed, cuddle and pet them until they grow and eventually become a full-grown axolotl. Now you can feed them special meals and give them special abilities. The meals are prepared in the cooking pot and you have to find the necessary ingredients during the game. You can also use special cookies to specialize them in a fighting style (weapon type), for which they will have a bonus in future. You can switch your character between the different full-grown axolotls at any time.

Since the end of Early Access, two major updates have been released, each adding new weapons/abilities/modifiers and useful items, as well as fixing a lot of minor bugs. In addition to the normal difficulty level, you can also switch to a beginner mode (more resources, weaker enemies) at any time. You can save in the base as soon as you finish the game.

Conclusion:
AK-xolotl is a cute, but quite difficult roguelike bullet-hell twin-stick shooter that impresses with its charm and style. The gunplay is less frantic than in other comparable games, but it is precise and the controls are very responsive. There are a lot of different weapons and items that make every run different. AK-xolotl is unlikely to win an award for a new game concept, but for fans of games like Enter the Dungeon, Nuclear Throne, Voidigo or Juicy Realm, it offers another fun alternative in the genre.

AK-xolotl is awesome, I've been following the game for around 2 years and played the demos before it was even a roguelike, I supported the kickstarter immediately and have loved watching the game grow. The game is super fun and so so so adorable (and the soundtrack goes so hard) I've been having a blast playing it with all the demos, and now the full release. The team is super passionate and engaged with the community and just generally the coolest people. Everyone should buy and support this game, you wont regret it <3

Really missing polish and game design fundamentals.

It feels like the developer focused entirely on the cutesy Axolotls and neglected the gameplay.

90% of the powerups are boring or useless, so there is little variety in runs. The meta progression aspect is entirely a chore.

Two "QoL" updates later very little has been addressed. Give this a skip and play Enter the Gungeon instead.

a reskin of Enter the Gungeon with a fraction of the content, and it's honestly just banking on people buying it because "axolotl cute lol." I mean... that's why I bought it. And I wish I didn't. Maybe worth it on sale for like $5 since collecting the babies is cute, but the game just isn't that fun. Different weapons aren't all that different, and all of the upgrades are just small, super boring, stat changes. 4.5/10

It's pretty close to being good in my opinion. There's a few things about this game that makes it much less fun to play than it should be.

It feels like this game deliberately wastes your time at moments. For instance, when there's a chest that spawns, why do we have to wait like 3 seconds from it landing to open it? It feels awkward and takes some of the fun out of opening chests.

Why is there an awkward 3 second pause between me nurturing my babies and the screen going back to normal?

Why do I have to carry each baby individually to the blisstaker and why is the blisstaker like 15 seconds away?

Also, it's pretty annoying having to start a run from level 1 since there isn't that much variety like there is with binding of issac. There might be a feature I haven't unlocked to skip the beginning floors but it's annoying having to re do the easy floors just to do the harder floors over again.

I feel like enter the gungeon is more snappy and with more diversity. Nuclear Throne has better character diversity and also more satisfying gameplay overall. I think the aesthetic of this world is cute but very hard to force myself to play longer when things feel so sluggish.

This certainly isn't a bad roguelike but I think it needs more polish to stand up against the titans of this genre.

Finally, after countless patches and a LOT of tweaks, yes, I can mostly recommend this once-terrible game.

Axolittle mode (it's in the settings) makes it possible to amass enough health and shields to feasibly get through the bullet hell of certain bosses (Killer Calves/Pecs , Fish n Chips and his alt, the alt of Tearex,) and through zone 5, which you might think is weird for me to point out since it's the last zone and should be harder than the rest, but no, in a game that punishes damage so hard (and commonly forces taking it), I don't think undodgeable streams of 5-6 constantly-firing shooters with aggressively-tracking melees, sometimes a burst of three homing bullets, or massive rotating bullets, alongside the elite for the area that shoots out three more waves, then the enemy that shoots out a slow bullet that explodes out into more bullets, is very fair at all without 20 hits. To add onto that, some enemies' projectiles are pink, which for some random reason, do two damage instead of one, even though there's no balance to what enemies do it- if it was elites and bosses only, sure, but when it's common enemies who go into melee range spitting them into your face in a shotgun burst while moving at your base movement speed so you can't escape them? Really?

The different lotls can go from gimmicks to feasible playstyles, which feels quite in-line with other roguelikes, but something like shop prices being reduced and holding an extra weapon should really be in the metaprog shop (blisstaker) instead of on a character, (especially with prices that are already high enough that you'll probably skip buying anything more than you actually buy anything from a shop, not helped by the infinitely more useful and run-shaping Blacksmith taking the same exact currency to utilize, though he does appear randomly...).

Generally speaking, there's no *actual* progression, it's more completing runs to get currency to unlock more items and weapons, with Blisstaker being a side thing with very, very sparse and not that helpful upgrades (outside of the healing fountains in later zones, of course). Random things will unlock pets and more enemies, I don't think there's a way to see what's still unlockable, but a lot of enemies seem to be locked behind killing certain bosses several times.

The pets are a recent addition, most of them are gimmicks, but there's two good ones (not saying what they are, there will be no nerfs caused by me today) that help several of the lotls/builds out.

Overall, GENUINELY a lot more playable than it was before. The nugget grind is still a little too high, Void and those bosses are still a nightmare, but there's a way to actually get through it now.

Big edit: my previous review for this game was a Do Not Recommend, but I'm changing it to Recommend thanks to the exceptional work put into the 2.0 update. This update genuinely revitalized the game, overhauling both in-run character-building and metaprogression. I feel like most, if not all, of my gripes about the game (uninteresting items, poor in-run economy, bad class system, always being stuck with a starter weapon) were addressed by the redesigns and new content added in the 2.0 update.

Is Ak-Xolotl a genre-defining game? No, not necessarily. It is, however, well made, and the recent polish and additions have gone a long way in making the overall experience far more enjoyable. It's not as deep as Gungeon or as twitchy as Nuclear Throne, but Ak-Xolotl sits as a solid, reasonably fast-paced (especially in Chaos Trials) top-down shooter with some really fun gun upgrade options. I think most roguelite and twin-stick fans would get a good handful of fun hours out of this one now!

as someone that sucks at bullet hell, is playing on easy, and can barely make it to the first boss, it's a very enjoyable game. im having a lot of fun even if i'm dying often. very cute concept and can't wait for future updates!!