Tested with Robots! (Wii U) Review

It's important to get one thing out of the way first: Tested with Robots! is not a good game. In fact, it borders on unplayable. The game moves sluggishly, lacking the fluid motion present in more accomplished platformers, and while the gameplay is as simplistic as a game can get to begin with - run from left to right and jump over obstacles - such basic tasks are insurmountable due to the game's terrible control scheme.

Rather than simply tapping the A button to perform the genre's staple action, getting the robot to jump is a case of holding down the button to charge up the jump's height and releasing it at the right time. Combined with sluggish, laggy movement, this is insanely difficult, turning even the first stage into an incredible challenge. There is no way for players to actually estimate their jump height; it relies on excessive knowledge of the game's mechanics or, more likely, pot luck. There's also no way to change the arc of the jump once the button is released, making accidental leaps into spike pits unavoidable and numerous.

The graphics fair no better than the gameplay, sadly. It's difficult to decipher whether the aim of this game's aesthetic was minimalism or whether it came about as a result of laziness; the latter is certainly more apparent here. The robot wiggles around levels adorably, pushing the boat out as far as two frames of animation - enemies are not so lucky, static sprites of stickmen, which are, frankly, laughably bad. The action entirely takes place on a grey background with a solid black floor to run around on.

The worst thing about Tested with Robots! is not its appearance, or even its painful gameplay choices, but its potential. The idea of playing as a video game testing robot, clogging up spike pits with corpses, while traversing insanely difficult courses, has a lot of promise, but the game sadly never lives up to its unique foundation. At no point does this game feel like it should have been released in this state, from the lack of detail or animations within the graphics, to the simply unplayable jumping mechanics.

Later levels start to reveal how great this game could have been. Conveyor belts, platform switches, and even the excellent mechanic of buttons, which briefly power off seemingly impassable waves of enemies, slowly appear, and the product as a whole starts to make sense. It's not hard to see where the game's creator was aiming to go with Tested with Robots! and that makes it all the more sad to see how it turned out. Perhaps with a little more time and attention spent on making sure it played as well in practice as it did in theory, this could have been a downloadable diamond in the rough, but unfortunately the game is too poorly designed to be recommendable to anyone.