AK-xolotl is a difficult yet highly engaging roguelike that will make you fall in love with its charming woodland creatures while laughing at its absurd violence. Seeing my goofy little AK-xolotl with a giant gun made me grin from ear to ear. It’s the roguelike fever dream I’ve always wanted. Once it gets in the hands of players and additional content is added that can smooth out its presentation of information, I’m confident that folks will enjoy this game.
One of the easiest way to catch my attention is by blending two seemingly contradictory ideas together. Things like a bullet wielding a gun, a lamb that’s leading a cult, and an axolotl with a machine gun. Wait – an axolotl with a machine gun? That exists?
If that caught your attention – great. It should have. The first time I heard the idea of AK-xolotl I thought I was experiencing a fever dream because of its absurdity. Now that it’s released, I liked what I was able to play for nearly 13 hours. There’s part of me that wants more, though.
AK-xolotl is a top-down twin stick roguelike shooter that put me in control of a charming yet deadly AK-xolotl who’s out to save its food. Standing in my way are hordes of woodland creatures wielding massive arms and able to poop bombs (yes, there are enemies who excrete bombs with a cute little sound effect). At first glance, the game disarmed me because of how silly it leaned. I mean – the cute little thing is holding a massive gun! Like Happy Tree Friends and Cult of the Lamb, the cuteness is balanced by ridiculous levels of violence. The thematic is absurd in all the right ways.
Its controls are tight and fluid. Most enemies clearly telegraph their moves giving you ample time to sidestep neon bullets or simply roll around them. I conducted this review using a DualSense controller and was pleasantly surprised by appropriate rumble if I took damage. Guns can be shot and abilities can be executed nearly instantaneously. For those who’ve played Enter the Gungeon, you’ll find much of its controls used here in a fluid and easy-to-understand fashion.
To start, I was given a primary weapon. These weapons have unlimited ammo and are selected at the start of the run. The downside is that these weapons have small magazines, so reloading is necessary. Compared to Enter the Gungeon, AK-xolotl has a much higher selection of starting weapons with clearly defined strengths and weaknesses while still being useful to take into the “endgame” of the roguelike gauntlet.
Secondary weapons are picked up during runs. Unlike primary weapons, they have a set amount of ammunition without the need to reload. These weapons are stronger than their primary counterparts, which is great. However, if the weapon runs out of ammo, it disappears. Because of the threat of a disappearing weapon, I was always worried to use the “good” secondary weapons because I wanted them to last as long as possible.
The tried-and-true roguelike special of dying over, over, and over again is critical to AK-xolotl’s gameplay loop. Every time I died, I was taken back to a hub to play again with access to different weapons, abilities, rewards, and more. The first several hours of gameplay was not as variable as I had hoped only because of how AK-xolotl gradually exposes players to variance as the player unlocks it. This meant that I had the same few abilities and weapons until the new content I unlocked was added to the pool of potential options.
I was surprised by how AK-xolotl balanced its difficulty. Usually, I’ve become accustomed to roguelikes having gradual curves culminating in a monumental boss battle that tested my mettle and patience. Oh how I became familiar with being eaten up and tossed aside by the likes of the Ammoconda (Enter the Gungeon) and Theseus/Asterius (Hades). AK-xolotl’s bosses didn’t chew me up and spit me out like I was expecting. Its bosses had a pretty rigid set of attack patterns, some of which emerged at the half health mark. Because of this, boss battles became predictable yet relaxing rather than anxious tests.
This also meant that the rooms in between bosses contained the most difficult content. AK-xolotl kept me on my toes with highly variable waves of enemies. Each biome added enemies who shot quicker and larger bullets. The occasional challenge room would throw me into a gauntlet comprised of multiple small and heavy enemies who would chase me into corners while attempting to pelter me with bullets. It was wild seeing a small group of enemies literally fill my screen with purple and red particles. When I had the right combination of weapons and abilities, I felt quite powerful mowing enemies down with shotguns and small machine guns.
It was weird to experience, really. I didn’t expect the bosses to be walks in the park while typically-boring rooms challenged me to no end. Whether this was intentional or not is aside the point – AK-xolotl rewarded me with a boss battle that could be easily defeated if I was patient. This warped my assessment of its difficulty because I was constantly surprised by its regular enemies. AK-xolotl is a hard roguelike – harder than Hades, Have a Nice Death, and in some ways, harder than Sifu. If you’re expecting a souls-like level of difficulty, you’ll enjoy AK-xolotl.
Like other roguelikes, AK-xolotl has a cute little hub where I could spend my currency in between runs. As I played, I unlocked access to several merchants who sold guns and abilities that, once purchased, would be added to the pool of currently available content. It wasn’t the most fully fleshed out hub, mind you, but it was enough for me to keep track of what I wanted to unlock in the future and select a new primary weapon in case I wanted to change things up.
If you’ve seen the trailer for AK-xolotl, you’re probably wondering how raising baby axolotls factors into the gameplay. Worry not – I got you. If you find an axolotl egg on a run, it hatches upon your return to the base and awaits your tender loving care. Through the completion of Warioware-esque minigames, you can raise your little baby into another bloodthirsty and weapon-wielding axolotl that can be specialized to your heart’s content.
Once I established a rhythm in the gameplay loop, the raising aspects lost the novelty and became just another chore standing in the way between me and permanent upgrades More on that in a moment, but I couldn’t help but wish that there was more to do with my little babies. Having the option to create a new specialized AK-xolotl to be used in a future run with a different set of innate abilities and stats is great, but I didn’t feel the need to raise more than five babies to adulthood. I wanted to do more with my babies.
It’s rare to see a roguelike give so much agency to the player in letting them create a loadout and specialize a character as they see fit. The AK-xolotls I raised were not expendable units that perished on a per-run basis. Instead, they were a product of me mixing and matching traits that suited my playstyle, preferred weapon, and more. Despite the variance of the next run lacking the guarantee of anything other than carnage, it felt good to use an AK-xolotl who excelled in using specific weapons and carried around my favorite primary weapon in case I was unlucky in getting “good” secondary weapons.
There just wasn’t much to do with all my AK-xolotl family. It’s a shame, really. They’re so dang cute even when they’re holding a sniper rifle that’s five times their size. It’s moments like these where I think back to how Cult of the Lamb succeeded in nurturing a literal cult, albeit to a degree where the roguelike gameplay was lost because of how easy it was to do menial tasks around the farm. I’m not knocking AK-xolotl for lacking cult building per se, but it would have been nice to use the massive space for something more.
I found that there isn’t that much of a story in AK-xolotl. Perhaps this is by design – the axolotl is a cute yet simple creature that spends its days feasting on grubs in calm waters. I digress – AK-xolotl’s introduction and mini-tutorials prepared me for cuteness overload mixed with some intelligent humor. The bits and pieces of creative writing that emerged from talking with NPCs was cute and quite punny. I just wanted more. Where did the NPCs come from? What more do they have to say? How might they react to the literal farm of babies I am nurturing?
The biggest issue that emerged from AK-xolotl was that of how it presented critical information to the player. It doesn’t do the best job in training the player to embrace its progression mechanisms nor remind the player of gameplay elements.
On the gameplay/progression mechanics side of things, I wasn’t really taught the mechanics behind raising an axolotl. I learned way too late that the permanent power upgrades was gained from sapping the happiness from the babies (and the babies, alone). It takes two runs for them to be available to gain happiness again, too. If I fed them and forced them to become a teenager/adult, they could no longer generate happiness…thus slowing down my path of progression. I would have preferred a step in the tutorial where the merchant who sold these upgrades literally held my hand in harvesting some of that happiness to show me what could happen.
The permanent upgrades made my future runs feel less difficult despite not skewing my power into an unbalanced territory. Even unlocking one source of permanence every 2-3 runs felt good while maintaining the challenge of the usual rooms. Some of the higher-cost upgrades made getting rarer weapons easier, but their drop chance was low enough for me to experience a rush of getting something quite powerful during a run that I most likely might not get for quite a while.
When playing through a run, I took issue with how health bars were only shown for larger enemies rather than all enemies. Sure, this could be interpreted as a quibble seeing as some runs gave me insane amounts of damage really early on that rendered the need to show a health bar over on a small enemy moot. Some runs I got quite lucky with shotguns and was able to blast enemies into smithereens in a single buckshot! But, health bars are important for new players in gauging their current power as they learn the ropes surrounding the weapons and abilities they’re acquiring. All this aside, I would have preferred an all-or-none approach for enemy health: Either all enemies are given a health bar or none.
I also was concerned with the lack of explanation as to what abilities did what outside of the ability select screen. After I picked up an ability, I couldn’t press pause to confirm which abilities I was currently using and/or what they did. When I visited the shop, the abilities for sale lacked a description, too. As a result, I had to memorize each ability’s icon and remember their unique powers.
It would be okay if all of the abilities I could acquire yielded positive benefits. But, they’re not all positive. A good chunk of them follow the format of +X, -Y to make the player opt into specializing their current loadout. For instance, there’s an item that increases your primary weapon’s damage but massively slows its reload speed. Imagine my frustration when I picked something from the shop without realizing what exactly it did, utterly ruining my current build beyond recognition. This occurred in several later runs after I had unlocked a good chunk of the temporary upgrades.
In theory, upgrades containing a buff and a nerf can be good for those who want to specialize a certain build. AK-xolotl lets players specialize as they see fit with its multiple weapon types and complementary abilities. I appreciate these run-specific abilities existing to keep my power in check, too. Even the most fun roguelikes can fall prey to players min/maxing loadouts that lead to players breezing through the game as though it was a walk in the park. Roguelikes should remain difficult and scale with the player’s power, even for a little bit.
You may be reading this and assuming that I’m harboring a wealth of salt against AK-xolotl because of my own mistakes/losses during my review period. Sure, I will own my in-game mistakes while also recognizing the need for clearly communicated information, be it progression mechanics to roguelike gameplay mechanics. While the current form of AK-xolotl suffers from wonky information presentation, I’m confident that these things can be ironed out in a future set of updates for the benefit of new and existing players. Only then can AK-xolotl shine as a pretty dang good and quite fun roguelike.
I had fun playing AK-xolotl. I did. Despite my quibbles outlined above, I spent nearly 13 hours playing AK-xolotl late into the evening. It was engaging to the point of piquing that feeling of “just one more run!” without being boring. It just took an unnecessarily large amount of memorization for things to click into a proper rhythm.
AK-xolotl is a difficult yet highly engaging roguelike that will make you fall in love with its charming woodland creatures while laughing at its absurd violence. Seeing my goofy little AK-xolotl with a giant gun made me grin from ear to ear. It’s the roguelike fever dream I’ve always wanted. Once it gets in the hands of players and additional content is added that can smooth out its presentation of information, I’m confident that folks will enjoy this game.
A review copy of AK-xolotl was provided by the publisher for the sole purpose of this DigitalChumps review.
