Axiom Verge PlayStation Vita Release Date Announced

Super Metroid-inspired action platformer Axiom Verge will be available on PlayStation Vita from April 19, developer Thomas Happ has announced.

The game was originally released for PlayStation 4 in March 2015, with plans for the portable version to follow shortly after. Speaking on the PlayStation Blog, Happ admitted it "took far longer than expected to make good on that commitment," and explained the delay.

"When I started development of Axiom Verge, I was using a development framework called XNA," he said. "Support for XNA was abandoned, so the community created an open source version of XNA called MonoGame. Sony told me they were working to get MonoGame supported on both PlayStation 4 and PS Vita. I knew that Axiom Verge would be great on a handheld, so I jumped at the opportunity.

"Tom Spilman from Sickhead Games was in charge of the porting process. Porting an engine to a new platform is an incredibly complicated task, yet he was able to pull it off easily for PlayStation 4.

"After the PlayStation 4 version was done, however, porting it to Vita turned out to be a lot more challenging. Optimizing an engine is slow and painstaking work. As the months ticked by, Tom was feeling a great deal of pressure to get MonoGame working."

He continued: "One analogy that I like to use when describing getting Axiom Verge working on PS Vita is that of a lightbulb. For months, Tom Spilman was putting in all of the wiring, but until it was fully connected, the light bulb just couldn’t turn on. And finally, about a month ago, Tom Spilman was able to make the final connection. The build went from not running at all on Vita to running almost perfectly. There were a few bugs here and there that needed to be tweaked, but most of that was fairly minor and easily handled."

As previously promised, Axiom Verge's PlayStation versions will support Cross Buy, so purchasing on the PS4 will automatically unlock it on Vita, and vice versa. Both versions will be available at 10 percent off for the first week after the Vita version launches.

In GameSpot's Axiom Verge review, Peter Brown awarded it a score of 8/10.

"Axiom Verge is a game that's easy to fall in love with because it hits so many high notes," he said. "It takes the Metroidvania model and adds layers of ingenuity that are in a league all of their own, the most notable being the Address Disruptor. Yes it's occasionally drab looking, and some enemies may not fit in with the rest of the world, but when a game is this good, these blemishes quickly fade into the back of your mind."

Axiom Verge is also available on PC. It will launch on the Xbox One and Wii U later this year.