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

---------------

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

---------------

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.

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

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.

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.

Ehhhhh. Mid to bad at the moment.

All the axolotols being different is made as a big selling point, but, no. They're not different, they're all just skins that you then literally feed resources to to get a known result out of, so that, if you're unable to figure out which gun archetype/base ability (or Type)/added ability combination you like best within the first few runs you're gonna do that feeding over and over again... To no avail because each zone has its own food resource, and you're gonna be stuck with leaves if you can't even make it out of the forest.

Oh boy those first few runs, though. You're ENTIRELY gated by beating the first boss before the roguelike-item-unlocker pops up, WHO IS NOT THE WEAPON MERCHANT NOR THE META MERCHANT, THAT IS IMPORTANT TO NOTE, you'll see the same six weapons dropped at random (if you didn't select an archetype), and all you'll get for ingredients is leaves. You'll also probably wonder where the items are, and you won't know until you go out of your way into a star-marked room to get one. That's not good. Roguelikes are built on dynamic in-run combos, or at least the ones with longevity are (stares directly at Inkbound and Zigguraut 2) , and this one's already thrown that out the window. Healing? HP ups? Yep, seperate rooms. Yes, you have to choose between them... IF THEY COME UP, they're not guaranteed.

So, we now come to the part that really nails the "mid" aspect of the game. Repetition. If you can't beat the first boss with any of the six findable weapons, then you're just stuck pointlessly grinding leaves with only the AK as a starter and nothing else, as the other meta-concept, which is... Affection, isn't based on how you do in a run, it's instead based in caring for each individual lotl-skin once every attempt, then denying them their growth and feeding that affection to a crystal that can give you certain meta upgrades for said drained affection, but once it's done, they then can't have their affection raised for 3 attempts, then you can start raising their affection again, but, again. It has nothing to do with run performance and everything to do with just dying, so, if dying fast becomes a strat to speedrun those upgrades, this is why. Basically, meta-progression has nothing to do with the runs outside of finding more skins to eke up how much affection you get per run or getting diamonds once you beat the forest boss, which is... again, mid, as their rooms aren't guaranteed to show up during a run, and they seem to be distributed through the different levels, so, you'll be max-capped on this if you loop too many times without defeating the moustache crab, and the diamonds will have no value until you do.

After that, you get the meta-item unlocker and discover the other thing to randomly grind up through only challenge rooms and boss kills: Diamonds. They're not in any other room, and, again, their rooms aren't guaranteed to show up aside from killing bosses, so, item variety is locked behind THIS grind as well as the other one. Repeat for after killing the junkyard boss, too, since the weapon-unlocker is the exact same, and uses the same currency.

At the point where I had to get/had gotten past two bosses, I just stopped. By that point you have only 4 of the 8 different starting guns available, but only the shotgun and ak are actually viable, the tiny pistol will give you arthritis (as will the other pistols aside from the laser one) through having to spam single-clicks, and the laser one is just plain weak. How did I determine viability? Easy, Your enemies walk toward you typically slowly, shoot maybe one bullet or a spread, and you can dodge or slash the bullets away, but, uh... The dev forgot to tune it so that the low damage of pistols would still work in zone 1, which, it doesn't at all. If you use one of the weak weapons, all those single bullets, spreads, and quick bullets will all get fired at random, very near eachother meaning you can't actually dodge through it, and since the melee starter isn't available even after beating the junkyard boss.... You'd have to get the melle archetype, but, the sniper is the real one you're gonna want at this point, so.... yyyeah you see, right? Another point of lack of variety. If a weapon isn't effective enough, nobody's gonna use it, so you effectively only have 2 starting weapons to choose from.

Time to mention abilities, traits, and archetypes, oh boy... By zone 2 you will have a grand total of 3 options for the base of your skin's powers: The same as the starting one or slower but has two starting shields, and for your active that takes forever to charge... A decoy. That's all you can get by zone 2, but, the thing is, the future ones don't look good at all, except for maybe the item creation one. Not good, and once again, variety's denied. As for archetypes, WELL. You know of the starters already, but what if I said you only get 1 side weapon slot? You might panic and wonder how the hell. The answer is buffing the drop chance of a certain kind of weapon through an archetype... Costing another only-appearing-in-rooms currency, which is cookies. You should know which one goes with which ability and which passive by finishing zone 2, so.... Once again, you choose once and then forget about it. Assumedly it's permanent for that one axolotol, but has to be ground again for a seperate lot'l if you decide it's not good.

Then, the least-affecting part of this game: the "jokes" and humor it's going for. It's almost 2000s humor, but, from someone who's from now, the 2020s, and as a result, it feels stiff and forced. Even the humorous viciousness of the axolotls are just kinda... normal, now. At the same time, though, it's lowkey enough to be completely ignored, which is why it doesn't really matter all that much, but does work against itself if you are bothered by it... (To give an example, the second boss makes a joke about DMCAs, which.... If someone else did it, might be clever, but here? It's irrelevant because the boss doesn't look even close to the funny-nod-named boss, and does nothing spoof-ful that might relate in any way to its namesake joke. Ho hum.)

All of this from only 2 hours. Oh boy. Let me just say: There were other ingredients available in the forest in the demo, and there were more starting weapons and the unlockers, except for the affection one, were also available immediately. Had that stayed, this might have turned out just a little bit better.

There is a roadmap however, so, maybe there's still hope for this title. As of right now, though.... 2/10. There's no REAL variation aside from the room-randomness and randomly dropped weapons (until you get an archetype, that is), which maybe shouldn't be (look to Inkbound for how to put guaranteed and random rooms together, seriously, then balance the weapons so they're all viable yet different... Like Zigguraut 2, or many other roguelikes that have many/genuinely different weapons... Remnant 2 is a recent example of this, and Roboquest is a future one.) , then increase how much meta-resource you get somehow, and just rework the affection completely, make it based in something you do in-run and not to do with dying and the empty husks that are the lotl skins. Maybe then it'll improve.

There's honestly not enough variety between runs. Very few guns, with each one more or less behaving the same way. The items you pick up don't have that much of an impact. I think this game has a decent base, but definitely needs to be fleshed out more.

A competently made game that ultimately lacks anything particularly unique or compelling.

Ak-Xolotl does have its highlights. The most apparent of these is the artstyle -- the pixel art is gorgeous and full of personality. I also thought the weapon variety was pretty good, both in terms of the infinite-ammo starting weapons and the limited-ammo weapons you cycle through during runs. From shotguns, rifles, and SMGs, to more interesting picks like grenades and melee weapons, there is a decent cache of fun toys to play around with during runs. Combat isn't mind-blowing, but it's fun enough.

The game has its issues, though. The biggest, in my opinion, is the in-run economy in general. First and foremost, the weapons: you can only carry one aside from your starting weapon, but the game CONSTANTLY gives you secondary weapons, both from random drops and as room rewards. It's nice to have steady access to new weapons, since their ammunition is limited, but the drop rate is overkill. There have been times where I've left literally THREE weapons behind in a room, since I liked the weapon I currently had and couldn't carry more. It feels bad to "waste" resources like this, especially since, as far as I can tell, there's no way to process excess weapons into anything useful. The currency/shop system is also bad: you collect a ton of the in-run currency, Doraditos, but shops are relatively rare and not very useful. Part of their uselessness is due to the weapon problem: shops only carry three items, and one slot minimum, if not TWO, is guaranteed to be a weapon you may or may not want/need. So, at best, you buy one or two passive items of varying usefulness and then often have currency you're not able to spend left over. All of these things in tandem create a game economy that's both generous and underwhelming, almost paradoxically.

The other big issue is that Ak-Xolotl's progression systems just aren't very interesting. The in-run passive items are pretty boring -- they don't confer a lot of power, and they don't really change how you engage with combat. The best upgrade option is usually just +Max HP, which isn't very exciting. The metaprogression is equally lukewarm -- raising axolittles equates to just pressing a button, and the class-building system is also lackluster, as most options you have aren't very enticing and don't really change how a character plays. Part of it is due to long ability cooldowns, part of it is due to a general lack of inspiration in mechanical design.

These issues compound to create a game that is ultimately just sort of forgettable. The category of "twin-stick roguelite" contains absolutely amazing games like Enter the Gungeon, Nuclear Throne, and the Binding of Isaac. Not only are these great roguelites, they're arguably some of the best games ever made of ANY genre, period. Considering their replayability, other similar games need to offer something new or exciting to be worthwhile -- and, sadly, Ak-Xolotl just doesn't do that. It's a mediocre game in the grand scheme of the genre, and I don't feel compelled to play it over other, better games, like the aforementioned titles, or even other more modern titles like Voidigo or Doomsday Hunters. Considering many of these games are also cheaper, it's hard to recommend Ak-Xolotl in any context.