AK-xolotl: Together is a new DLC for the original top-town shooter/rogue-like, a game that came out in 2023 and somehow evaded our attention. It was put together by Brazilian-based coders 2Awesome Studio and came out to a reasonably positive reception. But now, as the DLC’s title suggests, they’ve added some local co-op functionality to the game so has that elevated it? Well, let’s find out.
The original game went for some full-on cutesy violence as you played as a well-armed axolotl (a sort of weird salamander thing) who was out to avenge his family and the story is told in static cutscenes, so it’s pretty easy to ignore. What matters more is the main gameplay loop and it’s one that will feel familiar to anyone who has played any of the myriad twin-stick shooting rogue-likes on PSN.
Each of the game’s levels is a series of arenas with two exits, each offering a glimpse of what arena reward you’ll get from it. To beat each one you just need to clear out the area’s enemies (which generally arrive in a couple of waves) and you’ll be doing that with some pretty straight-forward twin-stick shooting (left stick moves you, right stick is used for aiming and you fire with R2). Along the way though you’ll pick up new weapons, which is important as you can easily run out of ammo if you’re not careful.
As ever with this type of game, each weapon comes with its own strengths and weaknesses but as it’s all random, you’ll be at the mercy of the RNG gods somewhat. But generally progress throughout the main levels is pretty straightforward and with shops and upgrade stations along the way, there are plenty of things that could potentially aid your journey. Although, that said, we seemed to find that we hardly ever had enough credits to actually do anything. That was a weird, recurring quirk of the game and between that and the lack of permanent upgrades, there’s none of that addictiveness that you might get from games that let you upgrade between runs.
What might stop your progress though are the boss battles. While they’re easy enough to figure out in terms of patterns they really drag out due to your weapons not being great and the bosses absorbing a ton of damage. They can definitely take the fun out of your run, that’s for sure. Now, there might be some additional progression mechanic that we don’t know about but if it’s in there, it’s not very well explained.
Overall it’s a fun enough game and the PC version Metacritic score of 75 is just about right, if maybe a little generous. But we’re here to also talk about the co-op functionality that this DLC brings. And while it kind of works, there are a couple of aspects that spoil the party a little. Firstly, it can be quite easy to lose track of which axolotl is yours, leading us to have to literally pick a side of the screen for the entirety of our time with the game. The other issue though is that it felt like each player’s firepower was reduced by pretty much half. So, ultimately co-op didn’t really improve things in any way. And once your co-op partner dies, the rest of the run is pretty much impossible unless you’re happy to chip away at the next boss for over ten minutes.
So, while the main game was kind of fun, this DLC doesn’t seem to improve it and for £15.49 for the whole package, we’re not sure its quite worth the money but its nice to see the game getting supported with a whole new mode and if you fancy some cute-but-deadly shooting action, you can definitely do worse than this.
+ Cute presentation
- Co-op doesn't really improve anything
- Update is free