Jack Axe

Life, death, taxes and Drew buying indie platform games. The only absolutes in the universe. 

Bought on Boxing Day 2022, I remember buying Jack Axe, the tiny platformer from Keybol Games, because the visuals reminded me of a cross between Grapple Dog and Celeste, and the mechanics seemed right up my alley. After ploughing through a bunch of other small games, but no platformers in a while, I felt it was time I got this one sorted – aiming to see it off in one sitting.

At first, getting around feels pretty good. Jack is easy enough to control on terra firma, has a nice bouncy jumping arc, a handy double-jump and an infinite wall kick for scaling tight spaces. After only a few minutes you’ll unlock the rest of Jack’s abilities, which come courtesy of a long lost artefact, in the shape of a bloody big axe. You can launch the axe in (almost) any direction, then, while it’s in flight, you can push the button again to fling Jack towards it, effectively making the axe both a weapon and a means of getting around. To keep things challenging, you can only use the axe dash once whilst you’re airborne; you have to touch the ground again to reset the ability. Launching yourself about is quick and easy, and it only takes a few minutes for you to get the hang of the physics and understand Jack’s limitations.

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Jack Axe At a Glance

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The idea is for you to explore the world and collect hidden gemstones, known as runes. After collecting a bunch of these, you spend them to activate a portal which will take you to the next world, where it’s rinse and repeat. You might also want to pick up gold coins on your travels; they’re scattered around the world and come as rewards for killing the enemies, which infinitely respawn. Coins can be used to open doorways to small areas that hold a few of the trickiest runes to collect, as well as housing a big boss enemy. Why are we collecting all this stuff? Well, that’s not entirely clear, since the story is hinted at once for about 30 seconds before being abandoned entirely. But then, it’s not like you need a deep and meaningful plot to make a two-button platformer work.

The level design is simple but effective. Each world is a semi-open zone, and has lots of little areas that you can explore to your hearts’ content. There are runes tucked away in all sorts of hard to reach places, and you’re encouraged to go snooping around everywhere you can find. It’s nice that you’re not restricted to collecting the runes in any specific order, and being able to wander around under your own direction helps offer a fun sense of exploration. 

The visual style is super sweet, with brightly coloured environments and enemies that are characterful whilst retaining a certain home-brewed simplicity. Perhaps inspired by Celeste, Jack has a squat little design that makes the areas seem huge by comparison, and opens the door for some huge looking boss monsters, whose designs are something of a mixed bag. I don’t have a single thing in my notes about the sound design, which means it was fine, I guess? I suppose there’s worse things for music to be than forgettable.

Sadly, the longer I played Jack Axe, the longer the laundry list of problems became. It almost became a checklist of what you don’t want in a platformer. Spiked floors that sometimes didn’t kill you and let you carry on. Jumping clear over enemies and dying anyway. Hitting the button to activate the axe dash and it not registering, or worse, the ability activating but you bumping into nothing and immediately falling to your demise. Since you lose some coins every time you die, it becomes a chore to continually collect them, knowing full well that a fair amount of your bounty will end up going straight down the drain, thanks to nothing more than poor luck and worse coding.

What’s most frustrating is knowing that if all this was just made more stable, Jack Axe would actually be a simple but solid platformer that’s pretty easy to recommend. Sure, it doesn’t have anything that would set the world alight, but with the cutesy graphics, and the open but manageable levels, it would only take tightening the screws (albeit significantly) to make this a much more enjoyable experience. 

Adding insult to injury, after four hours of my playthrough – persevering with the ropey mechanics, collecting all the coins and runes I could find, beating the bosses – I finally made it to the last level, and right then, Jack Axe ran into a fatal error and closed, apparently frying my save file in the progress. Ugh. The idea of Beat the Backlog is to actually complete all the games I’ve bought since I have a lifetime habit of abandoning stuff when I stumble onto something new, but I was just annoyed with Jack Axe to start all over again. 

And in that vein, there’s a four-player couch co-op mode available too, but I wasn’t willing to give the game any more of my time after deleting my file, so that goes unreviewed, I’m afraid. I’ve watched some co-op playthroughs on YouTube and it looks like the multiplayer mode could be fun with the right crowd. It looks to have a New Super Mario Bros. feel to it, without so many bells and whistles – if you wanna bounce about, collect some stuff and annoy your friends all at the same time, think about giving it a go.

Jack Axe has the opportunity to be a fun little platformer, but it suffers from horribly unreliable mechanics that make it more frustrating than it is enjoyable. Between the endless unrecognised button presses, janky hit boxes and your abilities routinely failing to launch, there’s enough to discourage some folks from going very far at all. But for those who show a little faith and push on -fear not- you too might be rewarded by a terminal crash and a deleted save file at the crescendo of the game. Sadly, it’ll take a lot more than the delightfully sweet visuals to keep this one off the chopping block.

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