Axiom Verge will launch for PlayStation 4 in North America on March 31 for $19.99 and in Europe on April 1 for €17.99, Thomas Happ Games announced.
The game will support six languages (English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese). The PS Vita version is still in development and will be cross-buy with the PlayStation 4 version. So if you purchase the PlayStation 4 version on March 31, you’ll get the PS Vita version free when it launches.
The “Metroidvania” game puts players in the role of Trace, a scientist who wakes up after a lab accident in a hostile, alien world. Players re tasking with uncovering the mystery of how that world came to the state it’s in and your role in it all. Gameplay, like Super Metroid, Contra, and Blaster Master before it, incorporates exploration, hidden power-ups, strange creatures, and boss battles.
In a PlayStation Blog post today, Tom Happ detailed some of the game’s power-ups, which will allow you to reach new sections of the game and open room for puzzles. Here are two:
- Nova – The first power-up you’ll get is a new weapon. Unlike the first basic weapon you start out with, the Nova can be shot in 2 different ways. The basic way is just to shoot it like a normal weapon. It has a larger size, so you’re more likely to hit your target. But it’s slow. The second way is to detonate it while it’s in mid-air, making it split into 6 pieces. You can use this effectively to shoot at targets where you don’t have a direct line of sight.
- Drill – The second you’ll get. When you first get the drill (after defeating the first boss), you’re in a room where there are rocks blocking your path. This is to show players how and when to use the drill. Later on, though, I made sure to teach players that it’s not only rocks that you can drill through. Some other materials can also be drilled through. The more diligently you explore the world, the more likely you will be to find health upgrades and new weapons.
- Disruptor – I came up with this idea from the days of my youth playing with things like Game Genie or just finding glitches that weren’t originally intended to be in the game. I found it fascinating to uncover areas that I was never intended to see and corrupt different elements of the game to see how they would behave. I wanted to replicate this feeling of discovery by creating a sort of glitch ray that would corrupt the reality around you. Every enemy can be glitched, and they all respond in different ways. This opens up a lot of new puzzle ideas for people to explore by glitching every enemy to see what it does.
At the PlayStation Blog, you’ll see a GIF preview of a previously unannounced power-up, whose name is still to be announced.