Drunken Robot Pornography Reviews

  • Titanium DragonTitanium Dragon154,841
    26 Mar 2016
    1 0 0
    Drunken Robot Pornography is a 3D FPS Bullet Hell Precision Platformer. Not only is the name a mouthful, but so is the genre.

    According to the Steam description:

    “You're Reuben Matsumoto. You used to own a bar. You gave your robot bartender, Tim, sentience. He went nuts, stole your other 12 bots, and burned down your bar. He's attacking Boston with 20,000 drones, 40 Titans, and his lieutenants, the 12 Drunken Robot Centerfolds.”

    Oddly, the Robot centerfolds thing isn’t quite accurate; the in-game descriptions of them suggest that most of them were random robots which did things around the bar, with only a few of them being “exotic dancers”.

    The game comes complete with a rap video in the menu screen, which is hilarious, well executed, and surprisingly catchy. That isn’t the only song in the game, either; there’s also a parody of the Kingston Trio’s M.T.A. (this one set on the MSTA – the Metropolitan Sky Transit Authority). The soundtrack in general is decent, but the two songs really stand out, and, given that every time a video game has actually done something like that I have felt impressed, it really makes me wonder why more video games don’t use songs in games.

    In any case, the game’s plotline is light but funny. Reuben Matsumoto is a gritty-voiced sociopath. His sentient, living starfish suit – sadly never seen on-screen – is quirky and provides amusing commentary. You get some random voicemails throughout the game from a reporter, your uncle, your friend who helped you with the robots, and your nemesis, Tim.

    All of this is fun.

    The actual gameplay is more questionable, though.

    The core of the gameplay for most of the levels is running/flying around the level on your jetpack (which has limited fuel per jump). You can gather up to four gun upgrades in each level (though many have fewer), which make you shoot faster/better/more powerfully/more spread shots (with limited ammo). There are a few powerups that a few levels have, most notably invincibility, a bomb, and a an orbital friendship rainbow cannon (which definitely isn’t a MLP reference, no sir).

    The way the game works is that the player runs around shooting at one or more titans who spawn in the level. The goal is to kill all the titans. You do so by blasting them to bits, shooting off the outermost portions of them at first, and working your way inwards. You must shoot everything off of the core of the titan (or at least, ALMOST everything) in order to kill it. The net result of this is running around a 3D titan while blasting bits off of it.

    As a bullet hell game, the game throws a bunch of independent enemies at the player, along with having the titan itself often unleash a hail of gunfire/bombs/ect. at the player. You have limited health, and standing still can often result in your death in a matter of seconds in some levels – or even in just a moment if you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time in a few places.

    It starts off easy enough – almost too easy, really, but the idea is to get you used to the idea of how the game works. The first eight levels or so are all quite simple, and you’d think “Oh, this isn’t going to be so bad.”

    Things then start going to hell.

    The first real nasty level I ran into was around level 19. But the game has a very odd difficulty curve. And this is where we get into the flaw of this game.

    Sometimes, people complain about games being badly designed when they really mean they’re badly programmed. Drunken Robot Pornography is a well-programmed, poorly-designed game.

    The problem comes from the mix of genres I noted above. A 3D FPS bullet hell game suffers from a problem – you have a restricted field of view. This means if attacks are coming from above, below, or the sides, you can’t see them coming. Worse, some of the attacks clip through the scenery, meaning that if you’re behind a blocking wall, they can still hit you even though you can’t shoot back at them (or see them coming, in some cases).

    Likewise, as many, many people know, precision platforming and the first-person perspective mix extremely poorly. The problem is that you can’t see where your feet are, and if you need to be looking in another direction when you jump (and you almost invariably do in this game), you can’t tell where you’re going to land. This is especially bad when you’re floating around through the air on your jetpack and need to land on a small launchpad to do so again. This is not helped by the game’s often-frantic pacing, and the fact that you need to continually move while fighting to avoid being destroyed by a hail of enemies and gunfire.

    Finally, a few of the levels (most notably Tightrope, a late-game level) have extremely, extremely tight time limits.

    The net result of this is that, even more than two years after its launch, according to the final level’s scoreboard, only 303 people had beaten the game. Glancing at the achievements, 78.5% of the people who played this game beat the first level. 2% of people beat the final boss. That suggests only about 1 in 40 people who start this game see it through.

    And it isn’t that the game is all that long, either – it took me about 9 hours to beat the game and get 10 of the 11 achievements.

    No, it is that some levels are incredibly, incredibly frustrating because the intrinsic design of the game fails to deal with the limitations its own genre sets for it.

    The thing is, it isn’t that the levels get uniformly harder – the levels DO get harder as the game goes on, and there’s a difficulty curve to it. But superimposed on that are a few random difficulty spikes, levels which are extraordinarily more difficult than anything else in the game, usually because of some combination of a tight timer, enemies spawning behind the player or in such a configuration that it is difficult to strafe away from them all at the same time, and, most frequently, precision platforming.

    The net result is that there are a few brick wall levels which are utterly miserable to beat, followed by a number of levels that the player is likely to beat on their first try. There is little rhyme or reason to this, and the robot boss levels – while often bearing snazzy music – are generally not appreciably more difficult than the others, though they generally do feel a bit snazzier in terms of design.

    These difficulty spikes make the game difficult to recommend. The game’s levels, when they’re good, are generally reasonable enough, while the extremely difficult levels are often extremely frustrating. It isn’t that they’re unbeatable, it is that they are just extraordinarily difficult. I probably spent 75% of my playtime on about half a dozen of the most difficult levels, including the final level, a very neat level wherein you stand on the boss while you blow it to bits which pretty much exhibits all of the design flaws of the game.

    The game is interesting, but I don’t know if it is good. Most people wouldn’t like it, and would get frustrated with it and give up. If being interesting is more important than being good, maybe this is worth a try, but if you have anything other than a very high threshold for frustration, it is best to steer clear.
    2.5
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