Published by Ratalaika Games, Axel Quest is a low-cost retro action adventure with some slight Metroid-ish gameplay elements. Personally, I am a fan of the chunky pixelated visual style.

Going to be totally honest here, Axel Quest has some problems, but I was enjoying my time with it… until I wasn’t.

At first, I was able to overlook and power through some of the balancing issues. For example, the spear enemies take too many hits and are cheaply positioned on platforms where they can easily knock you down the hole, causing a frustrating restart. Speaking of restarts, the checkpoints are much too far apart. I lost a good twenty minutes of progress as I was enjoying my time exploring the map, only to get one-shotted down a hole. Then, enemies often shoot from off-screen, but you cannot shoot them from off-screen, putting the player at a horribly unfair disadvantage.

However, these issues don’t really mean anything in comparison to a game breaking bug – the equipping glitch. The reason why the game is front loaded in difficulty is because the player doesn’t have any items or equipment yet. In time, stronger swords can enhance attack power while rings can offer welcomed buffs. Unfortunately, there is a glitch in this Xbox Series version where the game soft locks whenever anything is equipped. I reached out to Ratalaika on X to explain the glitch, and they said it is a new bug that triggers on the version uploaded to the Xbox Marketplace, and that they missed in their testing. Unfortunately, it has now been a couple of weeks and this glitch has yet to be patched. Since the entire game was designed with Metroid-ish gameplay in mind, not having access to the equipment is obviously a huge game breaking problem.

Like I mentioned before, I was enjoying this more simplistic side scrolling quest even with the balancing frustrations. However, until this equipping glitch is patched, this game is pretty much unplayable. It is disappointing and a shame such a mega bug shipped in the final build.

If Axel Quest gets updated with a future patch to fix these issues, I can make an amendment to below. Until then, beware.

SCORE: 1/10 (hopefully the game breaking bugs get patched)

By: Zachary Gasiorowski, Editor in Chief myGamer.com

X/Twitter: @ZackGaz

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