One day, at the scene of the fire, a cop found the perfect axe. And that was the day he became… AXE COP! But he needed a partner, so he held tryouts. With his new partner, Flute Cop, the duo had a gang of evil dinosaurs to kill in the Land of Volcanoes! “I WILL CHOP YOUR HEADS OFF!”

If this sounds like the beginning of an over-the-top story by a five-year-old boy… well, it is. Axe Cop started out as a short comic posted by Ethan Nicolle based on adventures he had playing with his (much) younger brother, and the comic quickly went viral on the Internet in 2009. Throughout the following years—with younger brother Malachai Nicolle mostly in charge of the story and older brother Ethan Nicolle involved in drawing the story and helping to guide his younger brother and tie together some loose ends, the Axe Cop comic story eventually went to encompass more than 5 graphic-novel-sized tomes of comics, a handful of webcomics, and even a late-night cartoon show that went on for 2 seasons. After a few last stories, the comic eventually went dormant in 2017—after all, the whole draw of the comic was how perfectly it encapsulated the insane, illogical, violent, but silly stories that young boys would often enact with their toys. Once Malachai “aged out” of being able to tell such stories, it was time to move on. If you can’t purposefully turn off your brain and enjoy lines like “Wrestler, if that baby starts crying, punch it until it stops” without thinking it’s saying anything more than a 5-year-old thinking babies are annoying and there’s absolutely no deeper philosophical meaning/statement being made, this probably isn’t the game or series for you.

Now, with that out of the way: this RPG video game, created by Red Triangle Games (a mostly one-man company with two others contributing to things like graphics and sounds), is an homage to the entire run of Axe Cop. It’s immediately apparent upon playing the game that this wasn’t just someone getting the approval of Ethan Nicolle (now of Babylon Bee fame) to slap the Axe Cop name and characters on an otherwise run-of-the-mill video game in hopes of selling more copies. If a character appeared in the comic series somewhere—no matter how obscure—they’re likely in this game, and the care to keep so many things just like they were in the comics down to the tiniest detail shows that this game was a labor of love. The story generally follows the order and story of the Axe Cop comics, but as you continue to delve into the game it becomes apparent that it’s something more than just a compilation of Axe Cop’s “greatest hits”. I won’t spoil this aspect of the game much except to say that many of plot threads of the series over the years are tied together brilliantly. Towards the end the game’s humor gets a bit too… self aware, I suppose?... but the ending is EXACTLY what Axe Cop would do in such a situation, and the dialogue and story are some of the highlights of the game.

The core gameplay is familiar; it’s one of many Dragon Quest-like RPGs on the market today, rendered in 8-bit graphics and sound to keep it even more nostalgic. Your characters take turns using either regular attacks, special movies, or items to attack enemies in various dungeons, with the dungeon screen turning into a special “combat” screen when you attack an enemy group. (These battles aren’t truly random or appear out of nowhere—you have to intersect with the enemy visually to attack them—but in most cases, the enemies do respawn after a short period of time or after you re-enter an area.) You level up by attacking monsters and gaining experience, which gives you better stats and abilities. Each dungeon has anywhere from one to a couple of bosses, which of course are a bit more of a challenge than your usual encounters. There are treasure chests/birthday gift boxes (it’s Axe Cop’s birthday for an entire month each year) you can find hidden in dungeons that give you items and power-ups to use. There are no “overview maps” like you can find in most other dungeon-delving games, however, which can make it a bit easy to get lost in a couple where the environments look same-ish, like the Snow Planet. There’s a town area where you can buy more items, sleep to regain your health, train to up your stats, and the like.

As familiar as this part of the game is, it would be selling it far too short to simply call it a Dragon Quest-clone with an Axe Cop skin. There are many twists to the core gameplay that make it considerably more unique—the foundation is well-worn, but what’s built atop of it is quite unique or at least atypical of these kinds of RPGs. For one thing, when a character levels up, you pick what stat it levels up. (To prevent boosting one stat too much, if you try to boost one stat twice in a row the second level-up only gives you half as much of a boost, encouraging you to somewhat more evenly level up your character.) New abilities are unlocked once a certain threshold is reached with a stat, not upon reaching a certain level. (You are usually told what this threshold is.) On one hand this is fairly unique, but the game itself only gives you a little guidance on which stats to focus on more for each character—it’s a little too easy to accidentally make a character that gets weaker as the game goes along unless you’re really paying attention to who is leveling up what.

Another twist is that, in a style familiar to the LEGO games, different characters can use certain abilities in the “overworld” in a dungeon map to uncover secrets or gain access to new areas. Ralph Wrinkles—the talking basset hound who shoots lasers from both his mouth and eyes—can sniff out and dig up hidden treasures. Sockarang—the superhero with boomerang socks for arms—can throw his socks over long pits and flip switches or grab otherwise unattainable treasures. Vampire Wolfer can change into a giant werewolf and climb walls that have claw marks in them. As you unlock more characters, this encourages you to go back to previous dungeons and explore more. And boy howdy, there are TONS of secrets to find this way, from minor stuff like hidden treasures to major stuff like hidden boss fights and minor new storylines, which of course end up improving your characters and stuffing in even more nods to the comics.

There are also mini-games encountered anywhere from just once to a couple of times throughout the games that have nothing to do with your typical Dragon Quest RPG-style game, but are just fun little diversions to break up the gameplay. Slide down a mountain in front of an avalanche, making sure not to trip over too many obstacles and be sucked into it, or play a Tetris-style game as you hack computers, for example. Some tile-pushing mini-games can be a bit overly long, but otherwise these are thoroughly enjoyable. There’s also an optional “Fighting Zoo” area where you can fight sequences of increasingly tough monsters with unique bosses at the end. It offers an additional break from the dungeon-crawling action while also keeping the core fighting gameplay intact. However, that being said, the Fighting Zoo is easily the toughest part of the game; the rest of the game is extremely well-balanced, with fights being neither too easy nor too tough. Usually I prefer different difficulty levels you can choose from for RPGs, but for this one they’re really not needed; you’ve got plenty of money by the end-game to purchase lots of power-ups, so even if you haven’t “leveled up efficiently” you can tackle bosses adequately—it may just take longer.

Speaking of length, for a $10 indie game I was expecting it to take maybe 10-12 hours, but this is a surprisingly long game. It took me about 35 hours to get entirely through the game, with about 5-8 hours of that going back to unearth collectibles and hidden bosses/quests and talking to the many, many NPCs walking around town who have lots of humorous or informative things to say. You definitely get quite a lot of bang for your buck, here. (Full disclosure: I am in the game as one of these NPCs because of a small favor I did for the developer a few years back, but this does not reflect my score of the game. If I felt the game wasn’t worthy of the “Axe Cop” name, I’d definitely say so.)

As it’s done in 8-bit style, the graphics aren’t anything to write home about—particularly on the main map where the characters are small—but the close-up portraits of the many, many characters in the game are very well-done, as if they’ve come out of Ethan Nicolle’s pen itself and then been pixelated. The default for the game is to come up in a window, as the resolution is low enough that if you make it full-screen the pixels are so big it actually bothered my eyes some. That said, you CAN make it full-screen if you prefer. I should also probably mention here that there are some rapidly-flashing light effects that take place now and then during certain sequences in the game; if you’re prone to epileptic seizures, you may want to stay away from this game because of that.

To tie up some final points, the sounds are what you’d expect from an 8-bit game; they do the job, but they’re nothing particularly memorable. What IS great is the soundtrack. Yes, it’s in the 8-bit chiptune style, but these are some really good beats I never got tired of, even after spending multiple hours in the same dungeon. Heck, I’d say they’re nearly the quality of the soundtracks for the old Sonic games; they’re pretty catchy. The controls are pretty basic, consisting of the arrow keys, the Esc key, the space bar, and the Enter key—you can’t customize them, but honestly they don’t really need customization. The game is also quite stable—only once did I run into a glitch that caused the game to crash, and that was solved by a simple relaunch.

Regarding moral issues, there’s a lot of “yeah, but”s—a straight listing of the game’s moral issues makes it sound worse than is, since it’s mostly from the world of a 5-year-old. For example, this game has the odd combination of there being head decapitations, but barely any blood. (There’s only the depiction of a couple of drops of dino blood splattering against someone in a cutscene so that they transform into part dinosaur.) Axe Cop’s way of dealing with bad guys tends to be decapitating them with his axe, but because of the limited animation of the game, most of them tend to be “implied”—Axe Cop strikes someone with his axe and usually they just disappear in a pixelated cloud, though a few times you see someone with their head actually lopped off. However, it’s like taking the head off a Barbie doll, in keeping with the tone of the game and the comics. There’s no viscera or gore or anything like that, and only once in the entire game is there actual visible animation of Axe Cop actively lopping off a head with there being contact between the axe and the neck—and it’s small, pixelated, and just a small red ring is left with one pixel of white in the center of the neck. It’s also of an animal, not of a person.

That said, Axe Cop doesn’t always kill someone for what you would consider an “evil act”—sometimes it’s just because a rabbit doesn’t follow the rabbit rules, and instead of hopping and eating carrots he walks and eats coconuts. Despite the “5-year-old” feel to the game, this may disturb some people. There’s also some magic in the game, but it’s mostly fairy-tale-style magic, with no real occult overtones. One bad guy uses some weird (non-specific) symbols to activate his teleporter magic, but that’s about as close as it gets. In keeping with a 5-year-old boy’s fiction, there’s no sexual innuendo or skimpy clothing or anything like that. There’s also nearly no cursing—one of the NPCs once says “cr*p”, but that’s about as bad as it gets and it’s just once. “Hell” is used, but it’s related to the actual Biblical place, as some fairly cartoony demons (and, briefly, Satan himself) are in the game. They aren’t particularly scary, just definitely evil. Same goes with ghosts and some zombies in the game—they’re present, but they’re more silly/goofy than scary. In keeping with the 5-year-old humor, there’s also some gross humor involving poop. One of the main bad guys is named “Dr. Doo-Doo”, and he has an army of Doody Soldiers. One of Baby Man’s attacks also involves throwing poop, though it’s the emoji-like “swirl” graphic and not particularly detailed/disgusting.

All in all, the Axe Cop video game is an absolute must for fans of the series, with solid gameplay, lots of callbacks and secrets, and a lot of playtime for your money. That said, it’s not for everyone—if you can’t get into the 5-year-old mindset and ignore larger implications of Axe Cop’s actions in favor of the silliness, you may want to skip this (because they’re not considered, he’s the greatest good guy and that’s all there is to it as far as the Axe Cop fiction is concerned). On the other hand, if you’ve never heard of Axe Cop but are into silly, out-there humor, I’d definitely recommend giving this a go. (Fair warning, though—you may want to buy all the Axe Cop comics after playing this game!)

-Beastbot