Akimbot

Akimbot was provided by PLAION for review. Thank you!

Akimbot is a third-person 3D Action Platformer, and it takes inspiration straight from the greats. If you have looked at Akimbot in the past and thought, "That looks like a Ratchet & Clank game!" well, you wouldn't be far off. Ratchet & Clank is clearly an inspiration for this game, but that's not bad.

Without delving too much into the story and spoiling it, this is your fairly standard plotline. It feels like it's taken straight out of an animated movie 2010. An evil scientist has gone predictably crazy and is trying to acquire a vaguely named "Artifact" that gives its bearer ultimate power, which he will use to rule the universe. The "Algorithm," essentially the ruling power of the galaxy, has enlisted our two unlikely protagonists to defeat the scientist and protect the Artifact. The voice acting is on point here, with the characters sounding perfectly villainous in that cheesy way and others doing their part to fit in with these aesthetics.

The storyline is mostly predictable, but despite you pretty much anticipating where the storyline goes at each twist and turn, the relatively carefree and cartoony atmosphere the game creates around galactic annihilation makes you forgive it for following established tropes.

Our protagonists Exe, a mercenary with a wide array of skills, and Shipset, a drone that has decided to follow Exe everywhere (probably hoping to get money), with his main weapon being his sarcastic wit. The dynamic between the two characters is pretty decent, although 90% of the funnies will come from Shipset, whereas Exe can be frustratingly serious and angsty, you'll soon get tired of hearing him preface every sentence with "tch". But having someone serious to offset the vibes from Shipset is a requirement.

Movement is a key part of any platforming adventure, and Akimbot nails this down pretty well. You can double jump, dash, and make a melee attack, gaining extra height as a "triple jump." The game fully uses this set of moves, and you'll be required to use them all to navigate the perilous planets you'll encounter on your journey. It's pretty satisfying to make some difficult jumps later on. However, there were some odd collisions involving tree branches at several points.

The combat is perhaps just as important as the movement for a game like this, and luckily, it doesn't disappoint either. There are 8 weapons to choose from in total, with 4 "less powerful" weapons that are available on-demand, such as an assault rifle or sniper rifle, and 4 more powerful ones that require ammo, such as dual pistols and a laser. You can only have 1 of these equipped at any time, requiring you to find a shop in the game to equip another.

The "less" powerful weapons aren't far off the power of the more powerful ones, and ammo is rather scarce, with you only getting a handful of shots from a full ammo bar, so I barely ended up using my more powerful weapons, reserving them mainly for boss fights or very difficult battles. The more powerful weapons can be upgraded in the shop, but I feel like ammo usage should have been lower, or at least an upgrade to increase ammo capacity should have been on the cards here.

Fortunately, the less powerful weapons are still fun to use, and with the movement system being good, it enables fast and fluid combat. Enemy variety is perhaps a little lacking, with many enemies on the ground remarkably similar to each other, mostly standing still and firing periodically at you, with shielded ones appearing later on. Flying enemies spice things up a bit when they are introduced, though, and tend to be more mobile, requiring you to maneuver out of their way more often.

Akimbot presents itself quite beautifully. I wasn't expecting this level of graphical fidelity from the game, but it makes good use of Unreal Engine's features and can deliver a very pleasant result. While we can't quite take advantage of all of this on the Steam Deck, the game still comes away looking decent despite the compromises we have to make.

The sound design also works well. The game is often quite busy, and the sounds help to immerse you in the world. The voice acting is also good most of the time. There are a couple of odd-sounding lines, but generally, the voice acting gets a thumbs up from me.

Akimbot feels like a Ratchet & Clank game that has stripped some of its non-linearity. The usual 15-hour adventure is condensed into a 6-hour one. It is very linear, essentially mission-based, with no free-roaming or choice, but because of this, it can keep the action and story always on the move, which works well for it.

While most of the gameplay is on foot, you'll periodically be put behind the wheel of a car, in the cockpit of various spaceships, or even just manning a turret. While these set pieces break up the gameplay a little, they sometimes feel like filler. The car physics is pretty awful, with the car stopping after every jump. The spaceship sections can be needlessly long. After 10-15 minutes of flying through asteroids, you'll begin to realize that these vehicle sections are largely here to lengthen the playing time, which is a shame.

Also, water damages everything. This is a robot civilization, but the first planet is nearly all water. Why has the robot civilization built a holiday resort here?! Heck, even dipping the car wheel in the water destroys it. It's a bit overzealous and led to at least a couple of deaths just from accidentally stepping into a puddle that went above my waist.

Akimbot - Steam Deck Performance

Akimbot had a couple of oddities on the first boot, such as the Resolution setting being set to "Value," but thankfully, changing the resolution fixes that. It does support 1280x800 as a resolution, so Steam Deck users won't get any black bars around the screen. The game also has excellent controller support, so you shouldn't have any difficulties controlling it.

There isn't a huge array of settings, but there's enough flexibility to make the game playable on the Steam Deck. This is a pretty intensive Unreal Engine title, which surprised me, but luckily, with resolution scaling, we can get a decent experience from Akimbot.

Recommended Settings - 40 FPS

In SteamOS, you'll want to apply a Frame Rate Limit of 60 and no TDP Limit.

In the in-game graphics settings, we're keeping the resolution at 1280x800, disabling V-Sync, Anti-Aliasing, and HDR. We are setting the framerate cap to 40, the render quality to 60%, the post-process quality to low, the shadow quality to high (the lowest), and the texture quality to very high. I disabled the depth of field and motion blur.

Akimbot still looks pretty good at these settings. I feared the 60% resolution scaling would cause the game to look pixelated and rough, but it actually looks decent. You can enable TAA to smooth out the edges, which has a minor performance impact, but I didn't like the soft image it produced, so I kept Anti-Aliasing off.

The frame rate holds 40 FPS most of the time; however, there are occasions when it will drop. Walking very near foliage can cause drops into the low 30s, and vehicle sections where you go near explosions can drop into the teens, as do some cutscenes. There's a short stealth section later in the game that frequently drops below 30 due to the visual effects, but we cannot do anything about that. Fortunately, these represent a minority of cases, and general gameplay is fine.

Power draw varies quite a bit depending on the enemies and the environment you're in. If things are quiet, the power draw is usually around 15W, but it can go up to around 25W in very intensive situations. Steam Deck LCD users can probably eke out 2 hours. Steam Deck OLED users might manage 2.5 hours.

Temperatures are generally around 70-80C, but in intensive areas, expect them to reach 85C briefly. There's always some fan noise, but it ramps up when a lot of particles are on screen.

Accessibility:

There are some accessibility options in Akimbot. For one, all dialogue is subtitled, so you can enjoy the story without sound. There's also some gentle aim assist and the ability to invert controls. There are also 3 difficulty levels to choose from. Playing on the middle difficulty, I found it just about right for someone with experience playing a Ratchet & Clank-style game.

As a side note, the combat music stops playing when all enemies are defeated, as it isn't always obvious. However, the game also briefly turns slow-motion on the defeat of the last enemy that has spawned, which is a good signifier for those with hearing impairments or just playing with the sound off that the last enemy in the area has been defeated and you can relax.

Conclusion:

As I said earlier, Akimbot feels like a condensed form of a Ratchet & Clank game, and that's great. The game is short, and most players will be done here in less than 10 hours. While there are collectibles in the form of data logs, they don't add much to the game besides backstory, so I don't think this is the kind of game you'd play through more than once. However, the shortened length keeps the story going, meaning things are interesting.

Good, fluid movement backed up by a solid combat system means Akimbot is a game I can recommend to any 3D action-platformer fans looking to embark on a new adventure. The dynamic between our 2 protagonists is good, even if it does take some time for Exe to lighten up a little.

As for Steam Deck performance, we are kept to 40 FPS and will still get frame rate drops occasionally. We're also running on low settings with resolution scaling, so the visual fidelity isn't particularly great. Still, the game remains perfectly playable, and at no point did I feel I died due to performance issues or lack of clarity. So I can give Akimbot the thumbs up to be played on the Steam Deck.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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