Bad Bots [Review by Uzzbuzz]Bad Bots is a 2d metroidvania type of game where the player plays as a lone survivor on a ship full of bad bots fighting to make his way to escape to safely. The game is alright for a couple hours of mindless fun, but definitely not worth the full price tag. Luckily it goes on sale for 90% off fairly often when sales come around. If you’re looking for a relaxing game to pick up a quick completion, maybe do not look here. It may seem like the achievements are highly earned, but the campaign is 2-3 hours of almost endless quarantine rooms, which I’ll talk about later in the review. Just a heads up, but you might get a bit frustrated before that.
Mechanics/Gameplay - Comparing this to Super Metroid would be blasphemy, so I’ll try to leave that out of it. For a metroidvania game, it’s mediocre. It relies on stopping the player in rooms of spawning enemies for up to 15 minutes at a time just to extend the gameplay.These room, called quarantine rooms, keep the player locked inside until they defeat a certain, often unreasonable amount of enemy bots. These quarantine rooms start off alright, but as you get towards the end, you’ll have quarantine room one after another, with upwards of four ten minute rooms between save points. Let me get back to this after I describe the mechanics more. You, the player, run, jump and shoot/chop your way through rooms of evil robots in order to progress. There is a fair assortment of weapons to pick up and use, but nothing overly exciting for a game like this. The gameplay feels a little bit slow, but nothing too game-breaking, even with 40+ bots on screen at once, except for one instance. There is one point near the end of the game, where there are multiple consecutive quarantine rooms without a save points, all of which take over 5 minutes to complete, all of which are filled to the brim with respawning melee enemies. They’re all melee knifing enemies, so you’d think it’d be a piece of cake and you can just jump over them constantly. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and be able to dodge them for long enough for the next room to open, but many times you will get stuck in their knife hold, where there is just so many enemies attacking you at once that you get stuck taking damage from them, unable to move due to flinch until you die. Not very fair at all.
As far as the bugs go, the above is the only thing that I’d consider glaring bad game design, as the rest of the game seems pretty fair most of the time, and bug free. Honestly, by the end of the game, or even sooner, you’ll start to sigh every time a quarantine room pops up. The first half of the game was okay, but nothing spectacular, and the second half just got more and more frustrating. 4/10
Fun Factor - No. Okay maybe a little at first. The melee weapon is pretty satisfying to use for a bit, but gets impractical fast. I’ve had more fun with free flash games of a similar vein to this. Where are the physics? Where is the variety? If you can get this for fifty cents, go for it. If you just want to mindlessly blow up robots, there is a challenge mode which lets you fight endless hordes of them with all the weapons unlocked. To put it bluntly, the game was short, but not that sweet 3/10
Graphics/Animation - So you look at this game and what do you think? It looks like a flash game. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what it is. The graphics aren’t terrible, but the animations are basic and fairly clunky, but hey, it fits the robotic theme. Too bad that it’s the player that feels the most clunky. The artwork is consistent, I’ll give it that, but all of the robots are a pretty similar model. There are also not many kinds of robots to fight either: basic gunners, heavier gunners, heavy robots, and melee ones. Oh right, of course. There are also these little robot bugs that will crawl all over the screen in a highly successful attempt at annoying you. I think these enemies only have two frames of animation and they just crawl all over the place so I’d rather forget about them. The few bosses that there are are not too shabby though, but again, the animation is simple and lackluster.
I was looking at the credit list, and it seems there was no dedicated artist, so I understand the compromises that had to be made in this department, and sprite art is rarely a bad choice. These same compromises and constraints are probably also what made the devs decide to make all the robots really similar. Despite having no dedicated artist, the story unfolds in a comic book style, which is a nice approach and a fair break from the action sometimes. 3.5/10
Music/Sound - The music in Bad Bots is forgettable at best for the most part. For a good majority of the game, you are stuck hearing generic spooky mysterious space music, akin to a very barebones Metroid Prime theme. This is fine and all, I suppose, except the music is pretty quiet in comparison to all the sound effects, and you will likely drown a lot of it out while shooting at all the bad bots. Thankfully, there is a redeeming part here. The boss fights have a refreshing and surprising change of pace in music. From the boring generic space music, to a pretty intense riff capable of getting you pumped up to defeat the boss, it does not disappoint. I was pleasantly surprised, but as the boss fights are few and far between, I can’t give too much points here either. 3/10
Replayability - Replayability in Bad Bots is negligible. If you get through the story within much trouble, it should take you around 2 hours. Unless you’re completely crazy, you probably won’t want to play the story again, so we move onto the challenge mode. Challenge mode is split up into 3 separate modes, or two if practice mode does not count (It doesn’t count for highscores). The rush mode is just a one minute horde of robots coming at you, and you have to kill as many as you can to score points. You’ll get bored of that one pretty quickly. Panic mode is the exact same thing as rush mode, except the enemies are a harder variant for the most part, and there is no time limit. You fight until you die. The map you do rush and panic in is not even different, so there’s not much else to say. 2.5/10
Level Design - The level design is not terrible, but many corners were cut. As stated constantly throughout this review, the quarantine rooms were just thrown around all over the place to increase playtime. Maybe it was to break up the game into sections that felt different? I don’t know, but I’d much rather have the game free of those rooms and have more actual metroidvania-worthy rooms to explore. There are few secrets spread throughout the game in little nooks and crannies, but don’t expect anything too crazy. Overall the design is pretty bland, and nothing apart from a few vent rooms makes it interesting. Most of the game is hallways, elevators, ledges, and falling platforms. At least there’s plenty of boxes to break for ammo, because you can never have enough ammo, especially later on. There’s nothing here that sets it apart from other games of its kind. 3.5/10
Achievements - The only thing saving the rating here a little bit. First off, there are missable achievements. Don’t miss these unless you really want to play the game again. They are not that great, such as for defeating a boss without using a weapon that you literally get right before the fight. So, if you didn’t know about the achievement, chances are you might just pick up the weapon and go to town. Not a pleasant awakening. The other missable achievement is for defeating the final boss with 20% health remaining. This isn’t too difficult and it should be fairly obtainable on the first time you beat the final boss, hopefully.
The achievements do cover all the game has to offer. It’s just a shame that there isn’t much there to offer. There’s a couple achievements related to kill counts and obtaining weapons which are relatively generic and expected. There is the obligatory campaign completion achievement which is probably the most annoying one if you didn’t miss the missable ones.
Finally, I come to the last three achievements. One for completing all three challenge modes at least once, which is easy enough since there’s no victory condition. You’re doomed to die. The second achievement consists of getting a total score of over 100,000 in the challenge modes. At least you do not need this in one game. This is just a grinding achievement and best obtained in the panic mode as you can rack up a lot more points than rush. Finally, there is an achievement for dying 50 times. This is horribly boring and unless you are really really bad, you will not die anywhere near that many times in the whole game. Yep, that means you’ll be sitting there letting yourself be killed for a good few minutes. At least right after the final boss there is a room where you will be auto killed fairly quickly if you do nothing. 4/10
Pros:
+ Good boss music
+ Fair weapon variety
Cons:
- Horrible filler rooms
- Boring
- No replay value
Overall Score: 3.4/10
1.5