8 Best Video Games Made Entirely By One Person

Axiom Verge is less a love letter to the Metroidvania series, and more a bloody romance novel with comedy lipstick marks on the pages.

However before you write off this indie gem as being just a copycat, you need to consider that what Axiom Verge does best is cherry-pick the diamonds from the crowns of other titles and fuses them together into its own glorious headpiece.

There is not a single ounce of fat on this title, and it's clear that this project was meticulously crafted by a true fan of the genre, which Tom Harpp totally is. You can tell in some of the design choices that Harpp takes what works and cuts what doesn't in turn polishing Axiom Verge into a classic of the sub-genre. Liquid smooth gameplay meshes with a hauntingly evocative art style, and it's all tied together with an array of powerups that makes you feel like a swiss army toolkit of death and destruction.

Helping to balance this is the stiff resistance put up by the game's enemies, all of which have been tweaked and fine-tuned to give the player a satisfying and fair challenge. Don't skip on this title because of its moments of imitation, praise this title for elevating the standards by with others should be judged by in the genre.