To be honest, when I saw the words "Ax Battle", my first reaction was - another io cheating game, right? After all, there are so many io battles on the market now, from "Ball Battle" to "Barbarian Battle", the same routine is used to play them. But I saw that it was in a pixel style, and the developer was Shenzhen Jixiang Interactive Entertainment. I suddenly had an impression that this company had made several small but thoughtful games before, so I downloaded it and gave it a try.
I'm not going to brag about it, but I was really surprised after I started using it. Let's talk about the first impression first. The pixel art style of this game is not the kind of rough pixels that fool people, but the kind of detailed pixels with a retro soul. The characters are square men, but the headgear and weapons of each square man are different. Among the initial few characters, there is actually a fat man with a double axe. His attack movements include forward and backward rocking, which reminds me of the feel of "Limbo" played on the Nokia N78. I was a little emotional at the time. Nowadays, mobile game graphics are all 4K, but pixel style has become a scarce product.
In terms of gameplay, it is essentially the basis of io Brawl, which is to pick up equipment, eat resources, eliminate other players on the map, and finally come out alive. But "Brawl" adds some fighting game elements to the combat system. For example, you have light attack, heavy attack, block and roll. Weapons are divided into knives, axes, hammers and swords. Each type of weapon has different attack modules. The ax is slow but does high damage, the knife is fast but has a small range, and the hammer has a knock-up effect. This design makes the game not only about hand speed and positioning, but also a little more strategic. I played more than a dozen games and found that players who can block and players who can only slash without thinking are completely on two levels. This kind of mechanical depth is rare in io games.
But there are also drawbacks. The first is the issue of balance. I was taken away three times in a row by someone using a blue-quality hammer in a combo. The attack of that hammer had a bleeding effect, and it took almost seconds to stack three times. Later, after reading the forum, I realized that some weapons were too imba. There is currently no balance update log for this game, and I don't know if they will be adjusted in the future. There is also the server delay. When I play on a 5G network, it still drifts occasionally. Blocking is judged to have failed even though I pressed it. This is quite fatal for a fighting IO that emphasizes operation.
I looked through the charging model, and it is currently completely free. There are no forced advertisements and no card draws. You just pay for some decorative skins and weapon appearances, and it is not the kind of krypton gold draw, the price is directly marked. This must be praised. There are not many games that are so pure nowadays. Maybe it is because the small team is still accumulating reputation.
In general, "Ax Battle" can be regarded as an io game that is above the passing level. The advantage is that it makes a little difference in the io category, and the pixel style also pokes the nostalgia of old players like me. The disadvantage is that the balance and network aspects still need to be polished. If you are like me and are tired of playing those fancy big-manufactured mobile games and want to find a simple, refreshing, and mind-blowing game to kill time, you might as well give it a try. But if you are a hardcore fighting player, it is recommended to wait and see until it is optimized for a few rounds.
Finally, I would like to say that it is really rare to see such a sentimental pixel style game now. Ten years ago, when I was playing "Thunderbolt" and "Insects" on Symbian, I never imagined that a mobile phone would be able to run such a complex game ten years later, but instead I missed the kind of pictures that I imagined in the pixel grid. 😂