Axe Cop

The Good:
As someone with no previous familiarity with the Axe Cop franchise, this game immediately grabbed me. Wacky characters and plot points are introduced with no warning, but it does it in a way that feels consistent with the rules of this whimsical universe, and by the end it goes to great lengths to connect all the dots.
The faux-retro graphics are another reason I even looked at this game. The color palette most closely resembles that of the Game Boy Color, but the screen is wider, more colors are displayed at once, and sprites are larger and more animated. I assume the style is faithful to the webcomic and animated series, and it does look great.

The turnbased combat system has several distinct characteristics that deserve thorough analysis. Enemy encounters aren't started at random, rather enemy sprites will spawn in and wander about and battle will only start if you make contact with them. Combat is turnbased, but far from generic. There's not a traditional Defend command, but instead you can Charge to replenish a fair amount of MP. Doing a regular Attack will replenish a small amount of MP. Other Moves may require to use of other items (fruits) instead of or in addition to MP. Some Moves may cost HP. Enemies may be considered Flying and can then only be hit with projectiles. Machine-type enemies may be Hacked for various effects. Then there's stealing items from enemies and learning their moves, and bosses with their own twisted rules you have to account for. Simply put, combat offers a lot of creative variety.

Another factor to the balancing of combat is your stat gains on level up. In most RPGs, all your stats increase. In Axe Cop, you get to pick one stat to increase. On your next level up, the previous stat you chose only offers half of its value so as to entice you to spread your points around. Each party member has their own stat growth parameters, so they all retain their own role in the party . Later in the game you may find scrolls that let you increase the level gains either by giving a more even increase to all stats or by giving major increases to a character's main stats. The choice is yours.
Furthermore, party members mainly learn new moves when certain stats reach a threshold. You can check that in the Fighter Moves section on your Cellphone, which unfortunately you don't have access to when you're assigning points after levelling up. The game also hides some stat-boosting vitamins, and I highly recommend holding on to those for characters who learn moves later into stats they get few points from. For instance, Fire Slicer needs a bunch of defense but only gets one point per level whereas a vitamin would give him five points. And you do want to teach every team member all their moves, because they get a big stat boost if you manage that.

Of course, there's more to an RPG's gameplay than just the combat. After walking for a few steps, your character will start sprinting which will let you jump over gaps. Every team member has their own special field ability as well; Axe Cop can chop down obstacles, Fire Slicer can light up dark rooms, Sockarang can throw boomerangs to hit switches and grab items, Ralph Wrinkles can sniff out hidden secrets, etc. All of this lends itself to creative level layouts and a team with no weak links in it.

The Bad:
Axe Cop does not employ a "less is more" mentality to its level design. While the game essentially is structured as an overworld and 8 separate dungeons or "cases", these worlds are so large that they require multiple checkpoints spread far apart. The worst of it is case 3, where you're going into a laboratory that is 10 floors deep. Each floor has several large rooms, and you have to go through all of them multiple times as you're searching for ways to open the color-coded doors on each floor until you can reach the very bottom. It's a massive place, and the appearance of the floors don't change enough that I could create a mental map. While the dungeon crawling does get broken up by a falling block puzzle when you unlock the color doors, the puzzles amount to minutes out of several hours spent in there.

While I can praise the music and enemy designs, the gigantic levels do them no favors. During the 3-5 hours I spent on case 3, there were 4 different types of enemy I could find; the shark bat, bear crab, military grunt, and night monster. That's it. The cool features of the battle system lose all ability to impress or entertain when you fight the same battles a hundred times over. Also, the random encounters do not have their own fight music. You just keep hearing the dungeon music loop forever and on and on. Case 2, while a dramatic increase in scale from the introductory case, at least had two different pieces of music for indoors and outdoors, and a slight change in which enemies were available. Case 3 and its eye-searing neon pink tiles may be where players drop off, I fear. That would be a shame, because it gets better from there and case 4 felt especially short and sweet.

Some of the puzzles also suffer from bloat. One example is in case 7, where you have to solve a 7x7 puzzle where every piece has at most three shades of blue and one shade of yellow. The finished image is visible if you inspect a picture on the wall, but you have to push several puzzle pieces away to reach it and you may not even see it in the sea of blue you're in. This puzzle would be easy if you could click and drag pieces around, but we are confined to our grid-based movement and our player character occupies physical space in this cramped room where you can only push and drag individual blocks. It took me no less than an hour to solve it. Another example is between cases 7 & 8, you're in a big open environment with no enemies and you're collecting 160 bees that are spread out all over. Why does there have to be so many bees?

One positive I mentioned was that each character has a way of interacting with the environment that's unique to them. From the beginning Axe Cop is joined by Flute Cop, and he can play a song at bear statues scattered across all worlds. Playing the song will trigger a change in the map, unique to each location. This flute ability is retained when Flute Cop turns into Avocado Soldier before case 2, and by case 4 he can turn into Ghost Cop to play the flute to go into the Ghost World. This is all fine, and the game teaches you to treat the bear statue as a cue to bring in Flute Cop, whatever form he is in.
That works until case 7 where my problem lies. In order to make progress I had to play a song to the bear statue not as Flute Cop, but as Sockarang. Sockarang learns to play the guitar at the end of case 2, but in the next case the party is split up so he's absent, and in case 4 we're introduced to Ghost Cop's interactions with the statues. Before chapter 7 Sockarang was never called upon to play, but he was repeatedly brought in to throw his boomerangs. In other words, the game does a terrible job at teaching you a mechanic, doesn't make use of it for 15 hours, and then expects you to remember it. If not for the developer's Let's Play, I would never have figured out what to do.

The Verdict:
All of my praise is painted in broad strokes that encompass the whole game, whereas my complaints are a lot more granular and nitpicky. What I see as a flaw in pacing feels like it comes from a place of love for the project and wanting to provide as much content as possible. The game feels massive and dense, telling a comprehensive and complete story in some 20-30 hours. And that's not accounting for all the optional content, which includes battle gauntlets, optional bosses, hidden collectibles, learning secret moves, and more.
I would highly recommend this to any fan of turnbased RPGs and/or retro gamers in general. While the ride wasn't always smooth, I was here for a wild one and it did deliver. This is unambiguously the best 2020 Steam game I've played, and it has only gotten better since I originally wrote this review. More content, more features, more characters, and the developer took my crtique of case 3 to heart and added maps. Kudos for that!