AX:EL - Air XenoDawn

I want to like AX:EL more than the game actually lets me. The core pitch is legitimate: build a shape-shifting sci-fi craft from hull to wings and countermeasures, then chase enemies from the sky straight into the ocean in a single fluid transition. That air-to-water morph moment, the first time you pull it off in a dogfight, genuinely feels like something. The problem is that the game hands you this interesting idea and then surrounds it with a structure that can't fully cash the cheque. Controls sit at the basic end of the flight-sim spectrum. You get speed up, slow down, pitch, yaw, roll, and mouse aiming on top of that. Nothing that is going to stress your input setup, which cuts both ways. Low barrier to entry, but also low ceiling for movement expression. There is no real tech to discover here, no boost-cancel or drift mechanic that rewards hours of practice. For a shooter-focused player who cares about movement depth, that is a gap you will notice fast. The two main modes are Arena (online PVP dogfighting) and Mercenary Missions (singleplayer campaign). Arena is where the game is most alive: weaving between sky and water while tracking a human opponent has a scrappy, unpredictable energy that the AI missions cannot replicate. The catch is that the online player pool is thin, and finding a match takes patience. Mercenary missions fill the gap but unevenly. The pure dogfight missions work fine; the precision navigation objectives, where you are just threading your ship through geometry with no combat payoff, are a slog. Mission briefings are text-only and the story context, a 2047 world war fought over a living metal called MsM that lets ships shapeshift, is thin enough that you will stop reading the briefings by mission three. Weapon and ship customisation has real breadth on paper. Hull shape, wings, countermeasures, and armament can all be swapped out, and that does feed replay value for the craft-building crowd. The balance, though, is uneven. Some weapon loadouts are clearly stronger, which narrows the useful build space down faster than the component count suggests. A chunk of what looks like customisation is purely cosmetic, which is fine to know going in so you set expectations accordingly. The visuals follow a similar pattern: your ship looks solid and detailed, the sky and water read well, but the environments around you are sparse and flat in a way that makes the world feel under-populated. Stability is also worth flagging. Crash reports were present at launch and have been noted by players well after. Joystick users in particular hit a persistent mouse-binding conflict that the settings menu does not cleanly resolve. If you are planning to play with a HOTAS or flight stick, go in knowing that the input config has rough edges. Mouse-and-keyboard is the path of least resistance here. At this price tier, AX:EL earns a conditional pass for players who are specifically hungry for a low-stakes sci-fi dogfighter and understand they are buying an indie solo-dev project, not a polished multiplayer product. The underwater combat concept never fully delivers on the mechanical difference it promises, but the PVP arena sessions, when you can find them, have a loose fun that is hard to replicate elsewhere in the genre at this price. Go in for the craft builder and the arena mode; do not go in expecting a campaign worth finishing. Fred, Scout Team