Robots

Written by Ryan Genno  on March 23, 2005

Review: The Robots are coming, resistance is futile!

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If this is the first time you've ever heard of a game called Robots before, you are not alone. I didn't see one magazine ad, one TV commercial, or demo whatsoever. There was no hype for this game at all! This game just magically appeared on the store shelves just in time for that Computer Generated movie and that's what worries me. We all know the video game industry is now even bigger then the movie industry, so why are they talking more about the film instead of the game? OK, just because this kid's action game got released at the same time here doesn't necessarily mean Robots is a bad game, right?

Robots the game takes place in an all robot universe and it stars an inspiring young inventor named Rodney. Once Rodney fully upgrades to an Adult bot, he goes out on a quest to meet his hero and make it big in the city at the same time. His dream to become famous won't be easy, and there are tons of other rival robots out there who would love nothing more than to stop you.

To be successful in this game; Rodney must collect various scraps of metal to pass a certain level. There are important and standard scraps that can either be wasted away as bullets for your gun, or you can save them to trade them in shops for crazy stuff like weapon upgrades, movie trailers, and more. Like a lot of children themed games available the controls are easy to learn, the puzzles are basic, and there are unlimited lives here so you can play as long as you like. However, the game still isn't as user friendly as you would think.

One huge problem I found was that the camera constantly becomes a pain in the neck. The game has a lot of enclosed areas and when you combine that with oddly placed platforms it just makes it hard to see where you have to go. Usually a bad camera can be forgivable if the game is simple enough to play, but Robots has too many of these poorly designed levels making it next to impossible to move the camera where you need it.

Another thing that bugged me about the game was the rather dull graphics. All the wacky robots are fairly detailed and well animated, but the background environments themselves mostly consist of boring factories and warehouses, so everything gets old very quickly.

Maybe you are one of those guys that can stand watching a goofy kid's animated movie if it has a few celebrities doing the voices, eh? Sadly, they didn't do this sort of thinking when they made the game here. Not only is this Rodney guy not done by the original actor (played by that Star Wars guy) in the flick, but the dude doing the voice in the game really gets annoying with his cheesy one liners.