Robox (Wii) Reader Review

Posted by By Darkflame 0 Number of reads 2412 Posted 22.11.2010

For my video review of robox see;
http://randomreviewshow.blip.tv/file/4489429/

In the interests of full disclosure, I'd like to start this review by saying I got this game for free. The kinda folks at Dreambox games gave me a copy specifically too review and share my opinions of. Without being given the game, it is unlikely I would have purchased it myself - Indeed, I'd hardly heard of the game.

And it would have been a shame if I never played it, because I would have missed out on one of the most diverse, unexpected, original and yet downright sadomasochistic games ever to be produced by human hands.

You see, while Robox presents itself as an innocent wiiware platform shooter with a nice twist, at its heart is a game that loves to hurt you - repeateded.
You will die over and over, in many unforgiving, yet fair, ways.
The enjoyment you get from the game will thus be directly proportional to your level of determination. It makes you work for every step of progress - but
at the same time because of this, every reward seems that much sweeter.

So, if you can push past this pain barrier, theres a lot to love about the game - and a lot of love has clearly gone into it.
Essentially you play a little broken robot that has crashed on a planet, and you have to explore the...vaste...world in order to repair yourself and eventually escape. On its basic level it plays much like other games in the "metroid-vania" genre. You explore around, defeat bose's, gain upgrades, and with those upgrades can thus reach new area's to explore.

Where the nice twist comes is in the little creatures you find along the way. They aren't easy to find, or reach, but if you get to them they crawl inside your robot body. You can then switch to an "inside view" of yourself at any time, and use them to repair and activate systems inside of you. Each creature has a different ability, and you can only use each one once. This gives the game both a unique twist and a welcome change of pace. These puzzle sections arn't perfect, however. It takes a lot of creatures found to make relatively little progress, and sometimes it can be frustratingly time-taking to move the little creatures about. It would also be nice if the puzzle's themselves were harder.
That said, after a extremely stressful, intensive battle, its nice to have a more relaxing puzzle section. Even better, because the inside is controlled differently, it gives your other figures time to recover!

The "macro/micro" separation of gameplay styles isn't the only thing the game has to offer however. In its main, platform/shooter capacity the game has a huge diversity of stuff to do. The landscape's constantly chucking new idea's and new "WTF" moments at you that highlight just how conservative other 2d platformers can be. Its somewhat comparable to the PC game "Aquaria" in this way. The level design certainly deserves some praise, and its unlikely you'd get bored before the end of the game. (assuming you don't give up Smilie )

In terms of length, the game offers tremendous value. Even if it wasn't as challenging as it is, this would still be a big game that takes you a long time to finish. Theres 3 huge
openly explorable worlds linked together at multiple points (if you can find them). Save points are pretty regular and act as teleporters too....so theres not much backtracking
either.

The only real downsides to the game are a few bits that lack polish, or some bits that seem a touch too nasty.
For example, your health upgrades cap-out past a certain point, meaning that the hard-earned set of gears you expected to give you a little health boast don't. Theres also an inability to re-read some instructions you'r given when you activate some ability's. For most, this probably wont be a problem, but (if your like me) and skim-read something a bit too fast you can then struggle for awhile to work something out.
The game also doesn't give any damage-indication on enemy's for everything except the biggest bose's, making it hard at times to know if your doing damage...or if something can be damaged at all. A simple red-flash would have helped so much earlier on in the game. ("Wait....I CAN defeat those spider things?").

Still, despite these points, assuming your one that loves a challenging game, a big world, and a somewhat oldschool gameplay style, this is almost certainly a must get game.
There really isn't anything like it on WiiWare, and its hard to deign the value for money aspect of it.

---

ps. For those glancing at my review score, rather then reading the review, you should add or subtract 5 to it depending if you like or hate really hard games.
This game really is too hard to some up naturally and give a fair score too, even if you too correlate highly with my own tastes.

pps. For those that are upto the challenge, and that (somehow) get 100% completion on this, you could get into the credits of their next game; http://www.dreamboxgames.com/wp/?m=201009

Darkflame's Rating Rated $score out of 10  8/10

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Developer

DreamBox

Publisher

DreamBox

Genre

2D Platformer

Players

1

C3 Score

Rated $score out of 10  6/10

Reader Score

Rated $score out of 10  3/10 (6 Votes)

European release date Out now   North America release date Out now   Japan release date None   Australian release date Out now   

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