Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Robox (demo)

Robox might be what would happen if Terry Gilliam (from Monty Python and director of Time Bandits) set out to make a Metroid-type game. If you remember from the Flying Circus show there were occasional animated transitions that start with a live-action scene, end with a live-action scene, and show some seemingly random action using photo-collage and crude, rounded off drawings, you'll have a pretty good mental image of Robox. You play a probe, dropped off on an unknown planet, which loses all of it's natural abilities and must hunt for them via exploration, platforming and solving puzzles. It's a promising start.


Robox screenshot


Prior interest: none/low


Either I hadn't heard of Robox before now or I'd confused it with Frobot. If I had heard of the game, it's likely I'd have been slightly interested in the unique graphical style of the title. Theses days, WiiWare (and the Wii itself) has a full stock of arty 2D platformers, so if you want to sell another, you need to make the gameplay stand out. In turn, the best way to show off unique gameplay is with a good demo, so it's a good thing we have them now.


Odds of purchase: none


Like a Terry Gilliam cartoon, the game shifts from one action to the next unpredictably, but charmingly. The demo begins with a rack of squared-off robots (Roboxen?) lined up for deployment. Starting the game drops one of them into the atmosphere below where you need1 to tilt the Wiimote to avoid cliffs. Upon landing, you have no choice2 but to hold the Wiimote sideways and walk to the right. After a bit, the scene shifts3 to the inside of Robox where you use the pointer control and D-pad to solve an insultingly easy puzzle with a parasite or biological component or whatever. That allows Robox to jump, which is convenient since there is a small mesa just to the right. To the right of the mesa there's a slope4 down which a suddenly spawned boulder rolls and crushes a third of the robot's battery power followed shortly by a second boulder which takes another third. Understand that you move very slowly, jump only so high as to clear the boulder for a fraction of a second, and the boulder falls much faster than you can move. And going uphill is even slower. And there is a new boulder being spawned constantly at that same location over and over again.


Thankfully, your little robot will respawn to the point where he gained the jump ability after every death. Hatefully, however, checkpoints are few and far between and the obstacles ramp up the difficulty exceedingly quickly. There's one bit where a swinging, killer vine lives directly over spike-lined pit. If you mistime your jump and hit the vine, all forward momentum is lost and you will fall into the pit, which is far too deep to escape and so you will die. Which means slowly ambling past increasingly difficult traps once again to try one more time to slip past the vine/pit/spike vortex once again. There's no rhyme or reason to the pacing which goes from pedestrian to punishing in the space of a moment.


Hard games can be fun. Robox might very well be have a good balance between challenge and accomplishment once you've found better upgrades and mastered the system. Even games that work on repetition and memory can be fun if action/consequence loop is tight. But the Robox demo fails to show anything but brutal difficulty. The good news, I suppose, is that having a demo will weed out the uninterested/weak.





1 - To be honest, I don't think you actually need to do anything in this segment. There seem to be no consequences for hitting rocks. Would the sequence continue forever if you put the controller down and walked away? I might try it sometime.


2 - Sure you could go left, but only a few steps before you run into an insurmountable wall.


3 - Sadly, there is no actual animation—just a quite cut to a vaguely circui-board-looking screen and a few pages of expositionary text.


4 - I call it the learning curve.

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