Robbotto

Long before everybody was flocking to arcades to beat up their friends in Street Fighter II, we were busy battling for points in single-screen action games like Mario Bros., Bubble Bobble and Snow Bros. The new game Robbotto feels like a throwback to that specific era of arcade game, complete with simple 8-bit graphics, a chiptunes soundtrack and plenty of loot to steal from the other player. The result is a charming little action game that almost has enough momentum to keep it afloat for one-hundred stages.

What we have here is a cross between Bubble Bobble and Lode Runner. You control either Robb or Otto, a couple of maintenance robots who are on a mission to save their gigantic space cruiser. When their ship went through a magnetic storm, it seemingly brought all of the machines to life and made them go crazy. Now it's up to these two unlikely heroes to battle through one-hundred retro-themed stages in order to disable all of the malfunctioning machines.

You do this by shooting the bad guys with a burst of energy and then shorting them out by spraying water on them. It's not enough to simply zap or spray them, since they'll quickly recover from the blast and the water does nothing on its own. The trick is to shoot them first and then short circuit their electronics before they have a chance to get away.

This is made trickier by Robb and Otto's limited moves. Beyond their electricity and water attacks, they really don't have much else to offer. There's no double jump, ducking, slide move or anything fancy, just a gun, hose and a standard jump. It's the kind of simple action game you would expect to see as an arcade cabinet at the local 7-Eleven in 1986.

And that's the thing; I went into this game a little worried that it was going to be too simple. The first few stages were so painfully easy that I wondered if there was enough here to keep me interested for one-hundred stages. It was slow, there weren't many enemies and nothing about it seemed even remotely challenging. But this was the game lulling you into a false sense of confidence, because Robbotto ramps up the difficulty in a big way. You'll go from easily racing through the early stages to dying countless times on the trickier platforming puzzles. The slower pace and limited gameplay forces you to plan out each attack and stay protected from enemy fire.

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Almost all of the challenge comes from the new enemies the game throws at you. The deadly machines come in all shapes and sizes, each with their own quirks to memorize. You'll find enemies that get aggressive when they see you, will run away if you get close, will roll up into balls and will shoot in all directions. There's even a machine that looks exactly like Nintendo's Robotic Operating Buddy and can resurrect downed bad guys. You'll also run into ten challenging boss battles, though I found that most of them are surprisingly easy to take down.

Despite the game ramping up the difficulty, I never felt that it became frustrating or unfair. This is a challenging game designed for those of us who grew up with this style of classic platformer, and I like it for that reason. Unfortunately, part of me wishes there was more to see and do here. The simplistic gameplay started to weigh things down after a while, to the point where I started to lose a lot of my enthusiasm in the second half. I had a hard time shaking the idea that I've seen a lot of this before, though it's certainly handled well here. There's nothing inherently bad about the game, I just found that I grew bored of the formula long before it ended.

Robbotto is a solid little platformer that evokes the spirit of 8-bit classics like Bubble Bobble and Lode Runner. It's a simplistic throwback that doesn't veer too far from the tried and true formula, which can be both a good and bad thing at times. The result is a fun game that almost has enough momentum to carry it through to the end. Whether it's with a friend or solo, you could do a whole lot worse than Robbotto.