Good Robot (PC, Early Access)

Playing the first 5 minutes of Good Robot was like hearing from an old friend I had lost touch with, but couldn’t for the life of me remember why. Everything about it gave me an immediate sense of familiar, nostalgic pleasure; the controls, the gameplay, weapons, bosses…everything was just how I remembered it, despite never having played Good Robot in my life.

The Good, the Bad, the Robot

Good Robot is a twin-stick-style shooter where the player takes on the role of a tiny “good” robot in a world of total douchebag robots. The game has no in-game plot or story whatsoever, so if you want to know why you are a robot fighting against your fellow robots, you just have to read the game description. The total lack of plot and instruction irked me a bit at first, but I almost immediately forgot about the why and just focused all my attention on dodging lasers, heat-seeking missiles, kamikaze robots, and giant mechanized spiders with poisonous vapor shotguns. Clearly, plot has no place in the robot apocalypse. However, just to prove there is a reason for your wide-spread robot slaughter, the paper-thin plot goes like this: in the future, robots go bad. They kill all the humans. One robot is good. Showdown of good vs. evil follows. Everyone up to speed? Good, let’s get down to the fun stuff.

Robot Style

The game itself has an awesome 2-D silhouetted look to it, with an art style that I really enjoyed. The flipside of this is that the game is extremely dark. It’s so dark that when I was buying a top hat at a vending machine (hats are basically force fields that will absorb one hit for you) I thought the hat was invisible. I turned the brightness all the way to the max and realized that I just couldn’t see it because it was black. This darkness is intentional, as one of the main features of the game is a flashlight that shines out from your robot, illuminating dark areas. Your flashlight shows you enemies, and even if an evil robot is right in front of you, you won’t see it unless you have your beam aimed at him. Still, I wish the game was just a bit lighter, as sometimes it’s an unfair hindrance, and makes some environments look repetitive and stale.

Speaking of the hats, like everything else in the game, there is no information on them whatsoever, which is kind of annoying. To be fair though, the lack of info is par for the course in Good Robot, so at least the game is consistent. Especially early on, you are confronted with a lot of different hats at different prices, and I couldn’t figure out why a $70 halo was a better or worse purchase than a set of $30 cat ears. Eventually I surmised that the price is directly related to cosmetics, so basically whichever hat you think is the funniest is the one you spend your hard-earned coin on. Personally, I thought the Russian style hat was hilarious, so I wore that most of the time, since every hat has the exact same function no matter which one you choose.

Mechanical Mechanics

A game like Good Robot (and most twin-stick shooters in general) lives and dies on two things: the responsiveness of the controls, and variety. Luckily, the developers know this, and they clearly put a lot of effort into both. The game controls are tight and responsive, even though your robot’s movement is “floaty”, almost as if you are in space. Racing in one direction then reversing to the opposite takes a second, and firing your weapon will push you in the opposite direction, especially with the more powerful guns. This adds to the overall challenge, especially on levels where the walls are electrified, but it never feels annoying or gimmicky, which is crucial, as the enemy robots start multiplying in number and throwing walls of bullets at you.

The game also mixes up the maps and enemy placement every time you die, which is important since every time you die you start over from scratch. This isn’t as bad as it sounds, however, and I found myself getting exponentially better with each successive restart as I honed my skills with my favorite weapons and upgrades and recognized how to defeat the bosses. After about 5 restarts, I began to really get the hang of it, earning achievements and taking down bosses without too much trouble. For a while.

Just when you start to get lazy though, the game throws some new enemy type or new difficulty your way. The electrified levels, for example, really make you pay attention to what you are doing, and drives home how well (or poorly) you’ve been maneuvering your little robot around as you lose big-time health for touching any walls. Suddenly, the secondary weapon’s recoil can get you killed, and even firing your regular weapon needs to get pretty precise, since every shot slowly pushes you away from your target, often into an electrified wall.

The weapons also have a lot of variety, although some of them are kind of blah. The soundwave blaster seems like a poor man’s machine gun for example, and a few other weapons seemed a little too close to others. Still, once you find your favorites you can upgrade your firing speed and some other attributes, and the combat is fast and satisfying. Your primary weapon is weaker, and your secondary is usually a shotgun or missile type weapon, often with an area of effect and a short cooldown. There are a lot of fun combos to find, purchase, and play around with, and finding your favorites is a very enjoyable task.

There are also some upgrades available for a price, and everything at the stores gets more expensive every time you purchase anything. The upgrades consist of movement speed, shield strength, a wider flashlight cone for exposing enemies, new weapons, faster firing rate, and more. As upgrades get more expensive and enemies get more numerous and deadly, making these simple decisions takes a bit more thought.

The Sound and the Fury and the Humor

The sound is another area where Good Robot really shines. The music sounds 8-bit awesome, and the boss music really ramps up the tension. Everything from the loading screen to the vending machine music sounds great, and the only real issue I had were some of the guns. A few of the guns sounded irritating to me, and I found myself turning the sound down with a few of the primary weapons. This is unfortunate, because some weapons are very fun to use but irritating to hear. Still, the overall sound is pretty stellar.

Lastly, the game is surprisingly funny. The menu and weapon descriptions made me audibly chuckle a few times, and the “headlines” that scroll across the screen at vending machines are pretty comical as well. I wasn’t expecting that, and it’s nice to have a chuckle in between hectic levels of full on robot destruction.


Summary

Good Robot is a good game. It’s repetitive in a good way, funny, addictive, varied and most of all, fun. Even after finishing the review, I picked it back up, trying to beat previous high scores and earn more achievements. Especially for the low price, Good Robot is a great purchase, regardless of whether you are a die-hard twin-stick-shooter fan or not.


Comments:
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2016-10-23 09:25:55... -

my email is chancedoo@gmail,com please email me the code it would be a an honor to test the game


2016-07-07 04:48:42... - rhody

Key plz my Email is


2016-05-31 20:30:06... - Angel

Key Please =3 , Mail: Thank you


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Good Robot Early Access Review
Good Robot Early Access Review
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Good Robot Early Access Review
Good Robot Early Access Review
Good Robot Early Access Review
Good Robot Early Access Review
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Good Robot Early Access Review
Good Robot Early Access Review
Good Robot Early Access Review