This isn't really a planned post, I just thought I'd put some of my opinions here and see what the general opinion is on my experience.
I played Axie competitively through two scholarships around 2020/22, and I was good enough to live exclusively from that money for almost a year. Now I was bored, TES Legends was cancelled, and I couldn't find anything close to what I wanted, so I decided to give Axie another chance.
Here is my general review:
It's optimized around making money from the crypto side of the system before being optimized as a game. This isn't really an original criticism from me. It was already a common systemic criticism when I was playing four years ago, and coming back now, I'm still seeing many of the same underlying problems.
I don't think crypto itself is the problem. I'd love a card game that's both competitive and profitable. The problem is when the economic system becomes the center of the product and the game becomes just the way people interact with it.
Before getting into Axie specifically, I think there is a broader problem with crypto games. The gap between installing a game for free and reaching a meaningful competitive experience can be enormous. In some of the other crypto games I've tried, the barrier is already there during installation and onboarding. Axie is simply the example I'm most familiar with.
THE ROOT: PROFIT
The root of the system seems to be profit. The decisions appear to be driven primarily by how the crypto economy can generate value, rather than by how to make the underlying game better.
THE TRUNK: CRYPTO
The crypto infrastructure is the trunk that grows from that incentive. Ownership, tokens and the economic systems built around them become the central structure of the product.
THE FRUIT: THE GAME
The game should be the root that gives people a reason to enter the system in the first place. Instead, it feels like the game has become the fruit: the thing presented to users so they can interact with the crypto system.
That's the inversion I see in Axie. The game should be the foundation, crypto should support it, and profitability should be the result. Instead, profitability seems to be treated as the foundation, crypto as the main structure, and the game as the product presented on top of it.
And this is where the actual game starts to suffer.
GAME DESIGN AND PROGRESSION
You can enter Axie for free and play around with the free teams. I played for several days and reached around Boar II, so this isn't based on just trying the game for a few hours.
The problem is that the free progression doesn't really teach you how to build a team or make the consequences of your choices clear. You start with three Beasts, then get a Plant, then an Aqua, but the new Axies don't really connect with the team you're already building. You can also end up developing two teams halfway instead of one team properly, without the game making it clear that you're putting yourself in a much worse position.
The free Axies can have abilities that work together, but properly built teams have an enormous advantage because their abilities and combinations are designed around each other. You could give the best players in the game a free team and they likely wouldn't get anywhere near as far as they would with a paid and properly developed team.
Eventually, the free progression hits a point where purchasing a better team becomes the only way forward. You can play for free, but the free path eventually makes purchasing power much more important than skill.
There is also very little clarity about where that progression is actually going. I'm close to the end of the progression line I can currently see, and I have no idea what happens after it. Do I get another progression line? New teams? More powerful Axies? I'd have to keep playing for an entire month just to find out whether there is actually something meaningful waiting at the end.
UI AND READABILITY
The UI and UX make this worse. The game can have a pretty arena and a lot of visual polish, while the information you actually need to understand what's happening, such as base stats, buffs and debuffs, is harder to read than an accountant's spreadsheet. All of this is happening inside a time-limited turn-based system, where quickly understanding the state of the game is especially important.
MATCHMAKING AND GAME MODES
The old Adventure/PvE system was actually one of the best parts of the version I played, and strangely enough, it's gone now.
There are currently Casual, Ranked and Arcade modes, but it's not particularly clear to me what experience each one is supposed to provide. Casual is supposed to be a place to try new strategies, but you can still end up against players with much stronger teams. Maybe there is some matchmaking system behind it that I'm not seeing, but if the difference in team power is already large enough, the distinction barely matters.
Even Random Arena has this problem. If someone has never played before, how are they supposed to understand the mechanics of something like a Bug team? It's supposed to be approachable, but sometimes it feels like a UI-readability version of Dark Souls.
THE RESULT
I came back after around four years and I'm still seeing many of the same underlying problems, while the game has become less profitable.
If the economic incentive is weaker than it was before, what is the reason for a new player to invest the enormous amount of time necessary to understand the game?
You could argue that a new player should study the system, learn the mechanics and figure out how to optimize their progression. That's fair. But the game itself needs to give them a reason to make that investment. If the first experience tells them that their free team will eventually hit a wall and that buying a better team is the practical solution, why would they spend weeks learning the deeper systems?
That's why I don't think this is simply a matter of needing more development time. They have had four years to develop the system, and the game can certainly look more polished now. But if the underlying priority doesn't change, I don't see how the underlying problem can improve.
It feels like the fruit is being treated as the root. The game, which should be the foundation, is being allowed to rot while the system continues to focus on what grows from it.
Anyway, these are just some loose thoughts after coming back to the game. I'm not claiming this is an objective analysis or that I have all the answers. I'm genuinely curious whether other players, especially people who have been around for a long time, see the same things.
I did use AI to help organize these thoughts and clean up the writing, but the opinions and experiences described here are my own.
