Axe Ghost takes the match 3 style formula and turns it on its head, with some excellent design choices in its moment-to-moment gameplay. It feels fresh and taxing with its exacting demands of the player to make every move count as you fend off a horde of monsters and ultimately defeat Garnemar, the boss monster. There’s a lot to love here, and I’ll focus on that before I reveal an odd design choice that undermined my personal enjoyment of Axe Ghost. It might not be something you care about, so I don’t want to put you off a good game by accident!
Axe Ghost features a corridor of monsters marching towards you, a ghost with an axe. There are many types of monsters and they’ll all move one square towards you after each turn. If they reach you, it’s game over. To stop them reaching you, you’ll be presented with three cards per turn, each with two actions on. You can choose to play all three cards, but only one action from each card. Anything that has a direction can also be toggled to push or swap things in the other direction, too (horizontally or vertically), which just adds to the randomly generated choices at play. In theory, you could have to pick up to three moves from up to 12 choices per round, and that will send your brain into loops working out which strategy to take. It is the best part of Axe Ghost, and it doesn’t get old.
The other cool thing about Axe Ghost is that you often have total freedom in which monsters to move or attack. When you push monsters, they’ll move as a clump of connected monsters if they are of the same type. The idea is to shift the monsters around into big clumps of the same type and then use your axe attack, which usually shows up every 2 turns, to kill them and remove them from play. One of the most powerful moves outside of pushing is the swap, which will swap connected vertical monster groups. If you have two of the same monster type, separated by a large group of a second monster type in between, this is the gem to pull it all together. You can create one giant clump to then slash to death for points. Other moves include replacing single monsters, killing a row of monsters, poking a column or row one square either way, or freezing a group of monsters so they don’t move forward. Whilst you can see the next turns’ cards in advance, you’ll always be on your wits trying to work out how to stay alive.
Then arrives Garnemar. The boss in Axe Ghost requires a special setup to remove his invincibility. You’ll need to surround him with 4 monsters of the same type on his compass points and then axe slash him. Do that three times, and on the fourth time, you can use the demon axe to land the final blow. Just don’t use that axe beforehand, as it’ll be an instant game over. Garnemar is a huge step up in difficulty and requires such exacting precision to beat; it’s here where many gamers will tap out. All of this occurs in a 10-minute timer, although it’s likely you’ll either win or crash and burn before the timer gets you. That said, I have panicked and sent a duff move of monsters down to the bottom of the screen by accident, making me very potty-mouthed and wishing there was an undo button.
All of the moment-to-moment gameplay of Axe Ghost is well-designed and thought out. My biggest bugbear is that Axe Ghost only has a daily challenge mode once you’ve completed the tutorial. There’s no single-player, offline content. If you can’t be online or have a steady connection, you can’t play Axe Ghost. The daily challenge format doesn’t feel handcrafted, and over time, it will feel soulless. Whilst there is some fun seeing who you’re about to beat on the online leaderboards, it is a crying shame that there are no offline handcrafted levels. The tutorial has them, which makes it all the more strange that it’s missing. If this doesn’t bother you, bump the end score up a bit, but for someone who was having internet outages, it took me 3 days to get a daily challenge registered. That proved my point that a turn-based game like this shouldn’t be online only, in my humble opinion.
Look beyond that design flaw, and you’ll have a brain-sparking time with Axe Ghost. It doesn’t feel like a match 3 style puzzle game, nor does it feel like a turn-based strategy game. It is somewhere floating ghostly in between, and it makes for a fresh, compelling experience.
Review copy provided by the developer. Axe Ghost is out now on Steam.
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