‘Akimbot’ Review
Developer: Evil Raptor | Platform: PS5 | Playtime: 12:20 | Platinum: 13:35
With the growth and more accurately, bloat of the games industry, titles are taking longer to make. Series that were once plentiful may see a single entry per console generation. Take Ratchet and Clank for example – 6 on PS2, 6 on PS3 but only 1 on PS4 and PS5 respectively. Despite the success of 2021’s Rift Apart, the Insomniac leak has the next game at roughly 2029 – 8 years after the first. It’s no wonder that indie studios are taking the ideas they love and making them in new skins. Akimot then, is a Ratchet and Clank game, with a dash of Jak and Daxter. Despite it being a wee bit of a bumpy ride, my final thoughts were positive.
The game stars two robots (there’s no non-robot life) by the names of EXE and Shipset, who after escaping their confinement at the hands of mobsters find themselves working together after dire circumstances require their cooperation. EXE is your protagonist, a mercenary robot who’s hard hitting and closed off, generally moody and no nonsense, dare I say a bit edgy - he even uses anime ‘Tch’s when talking. He is joined by Shipset, the comedy relief who is more Claptrap from Borderlands than he is Clank or Daxter. I think I’d like him more if his voice acting wasn’t so shrill but I suppose he works well in contrast to the quite smooth sounding EXE. I quite liked the dynamic in the end – this isn’t the story of a starry eyed dreamer melting the cold heart of a jaded other, EXE and Shipset are both pretty neutral to the affairs happening around them, only focused on their big payday. It is only towards the end of the story that a sense of morality overcomes them and they work towards the greater good. It’s not a novel concept by any means but a change of pace from other seasoned platforming protagonists who have been good longer than anyone remembers.
The writing is incredibly hit or miss, in a way that it feels like there wasn’t a select tone chosen before the script began writing. Some of the dialogue and set pieces are interesting and the jokes can be quite funny – sarcastic and witty. Other times the delivery is almost juvenile – the bad guy is called Evilware, like okay whatever it’s stupid but you move past it until later on he says “My name is EVILware what did you expect?” and some minor fourth wall jabs I feel the game doesn’t earn. Evilware is one of three main characters that aren’t the protagonist. Other than the couple odd stinkers, he and the other two are written well enough for the most part and voice acted well.
The game’s writing also commits the cardinal sin of using modern references. I can’t remember the exact quote but they make reference to an Ali Express like service. Every noun is replaced by bot – Botdamnit, oh my bot, what the bot, all expressions I never want to hear again. Yet on the positive flipside, some jokes are really funny – when the pair navigate a cave, Shipset laments his poor signal “5G? What is this, the Dark Ages?” Like I say the script is inconsistent. Beyond dialogue, there’s a couple references to things I was surprised to see – there’s a scene that may be inspired by Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (of all things) but that’s only a maybe. The other major one I saw was to Star Wars’ Rise of Skywalker, that one is pretty on the nose, like borderline plagiarism but it’s a cool scene so whatever.
The selection of weapons is a little peculiar. There’s four in the game – an Assault Rifle, Sniper Rifle, Rocket Launcher and Minigun. The lack of the kind of staples – Pistol or Shotgun is a little strange. These guns run on an overheat system rather than needing ammo which is fine, that’s neither here nor there. These guns see no changes throughout the game, being the same from the moment you get them until the end credits. Again this isn’t necessarily a problem but its inspirations – Ratchet and Clank and to a lesser extent Jak and Daxter have a more interesting range of weapons. I just think more could have been done. The currency you collect does go towards a weapons shop of sort,
just not your main ones. The player has the choice of four special weapons they can use when they fill a bar (from hitting and killing enemies). These weapons are bought from the shop and can be upgraded two levels. I only used the Akimbo pistols (for the games namesake) and they felt good but I didn’t really feel the need to branch out to any of the other ones so I don’t know how they compare.
Levels are linear affairs, progressed through as levels rather than missions in a sandbox or being able to travel back and forth. You’re primarily going to be in combat throughout, interspersed with the platforming and ‘Hacking’. Nearly every puzzle or anything that doesn’t fall into the aforementioned categories gets a hacking minigame. They’re random every time (I think? Maybe they cycle) and could be a game of Snake, Shell Game or a QTE. Occasionally you’ll have to put a code into a machine to progress, the solution will be in the environment. It’s not much but it does change pace a little. I mentioned before that each weapon runs off an overheat mechanic rather than ammo, it works well for the games combat encounters. These combat encounters are often quite overwhelming with plenty of bulky enemies gunning for you. Not needing ammo means you can play around with your positioning a lot more. Healing comes in the form of floating green drones the player has to shoot adding more flow to fights. You’ll be taking equal amounts of cover as you will zooming around like you’re playing DOOM.
It wouldn’t be a platformer inspired by the 00’s classics if it wasn’t chock full of changing gameplay genres - there’s driving sections, flying sections, turret sections and even a couple 2D street fighter parody bits. These are all fine, they just kind of come with the territory of 3D platformers
Despite this review probably sounding overly negative, I actually quite enjoyed my time with Akimbot. It scratches an itch for games that don’t come out too often anymore. It’s far from perfect but it’s fun which is all you really want from a game like this.
