Also on: PS5, Xbox Series X
Publisher: PLAION
Developer: Evil Raptor
Medium: Digital
Players: 1
Online: No
ESRB: E10+
I’ve been eager to play Akimbot ever since its release date trailer was unveiled during the last Steam Next Fest. Not only did the trailer give off serious Ratchet and Clank vibes, it was developed by Evil Raptor, the studio founded by the man who gave us Pumpkin Jack, another 3D platformer that also owed a huge debt of gratitude to PS2-era 3D platformers (and that was pretty great in its own right). How could it possibly go wrong, I figured?
By being a buggy, inconsistent mess with some major flaws, as it turns out. Akimbot may evoke a golden era of 3D platformers, but that’s pretty much all it’s good for. Taken on its own merits, at best it’s thoroughly mediocre.
Admittedly, a big part of why Akimbot doesn’t seem very good is that, in drawing so overtly from games like Ratchet and Clank and Jak & Daxter, it’s given itself an insurmountably high bar to clear. I mean, it’s the second game from an indie developer. While it may have the good sense to borrow from the best, of course it’s not going to be as good as games and series that are justifiably iconic.
But Akimbot doesn’t do much to help itself. For one thing, as mentioned above, it’s a buggy mess. I constantly found that events would fail to trigger properly, leaving me waiting for platforms to appear and minigames to pop up that never came. It meant quitting back to my last checkpoint, which was invariably just before I’d taken on a big swath of enemies. While I wouldn’t say it was absurdly hard to beat the bad guys again, that didn’t make redoing those sections of the game any more fun.
Similarly, I regularly found myself getting stuck in random places. While the game generally controlled okay, there’d be these odd moments where I’d move too close to a wall or a ledge and I’d be trapped. There was no obvious reason for any of it, and even if I was able to un-stick myself by hopping around a bunch, it still never explained why it happened in the first place.
The other thing that made me intensely dislike Akimbot was that, for some reason, Evil Raptor apparently thought that the one thing Ratchet and Clank was missing was a sassy robot, along the lines of Claptrap from the Borderlands series. That’s the only justification I can think of for why they decided the game needed a robot sidekick who never shuts up. I’m sure there must be someone who loves Claptrap, but I can barely stand him at the best of times, and having a Claptrap-style robot as the de facto narrator of Akimbot made me hate it that much more.
While we’re on the subject of baffling design decisions, I should probably also go back to the minigames, since I only mentioned them in passing above. For some reason, Akimbot feels like it’s packed with dull minigame puzzles that you need to pass if you want to do something basic like hijacking a ship. The games aren’t hard – think things like the arcade classic Snake, or games where you have to quickly press various buttons – but they don’t add anything to the game whatsoever. They feel crammed in for the sake of being there.
It really pains me to say that Akimbot is as bad as it is. It started out with so much promise, and it drew from some of the best influences imaginable. Unfortunately, as this end result shows time and again, good influences don’t automatically lead to good outcomes, and Akimbot is pretty far from anything that could be called a good outcome.
PLAION provided us with an Akimbot PC code for review purposes.
