B.I.O.T.A.

Although it was incredibly popular at the time, critics were not all that impressed with the Game Boy. Issue after issue, Electronic Gaming Monthly wondered why anybody would want to play a crummy looking black and white game when they could be discovering the Super Nintendo’s rich library of 16-bit greats. I wonder what Sushi-X would think about a game like B.I.O.T.A., a modern action/platformer designed to look and play like it was some long-lost Game Boy game from the early 1990s. Would he be able to comprehend the neo-retro movement? Or would his head explode when I recommend this lo-fi throwback over a whole basket full of big-budget triple-A titles? Find out now when I review the new game B.I.O.T.A.

Don’t be fooled by the small sprites and monochromatic graphics, because B.I.O.T.A. is an alarmingly fun science fiction game that is compelling right from the moment you turn it on. It’s the future and a meteorite has demolished North America, inadvertently revealing a new element named Viridium that opens up interplanetary travel. As you would imagine, this creates a new gold rush, with major corporations fighting over land and settlements. The biggest mining company is V-Corp, who has cornered the market by using a bunch of shady tactics. It’s on one of V-Corp’s bases, Frontier Horizon, where a new biological organism has infected the ecosystem. That’s troubling, but what makes this even worse is that a team of scientists and researchers were sent to the asteroid to investigate and then never heard from again. Now it’s up to a ragtag group of hired guns known as the Gemini II Squad to rescue the team and figure out what the hell is going on.

If you’ve played a science fiction game before or have seen the movie Aliens, then you can probably guess what comes next. By the time the Gemini II Squad gets there, the whole mining facility has been overrun by a bunch of creatures we’ve never seen before. And that’s not even the worst part, as you’ll discover by exploring the large, interconnected base and reveal more information about the aliens and V-Corp’s involvement in this mess.

B.I.O.T.A. plays out like a stripped-down Metroidvania mixed with Mega Man. It’s a run ‘n gun shooter that sees us battling aliens through a bunch of small rooms that are all connected together, just waiting for you to find the right key or item that will allow you to take your investigation even further into the mines. The big difference between this game and most variations on the Metroivania formula is that instead of finding the power-ups and items we need to advance the story, we instead have to buy them from one of the shops. The trick is that we can only hold so much money at once, so we’ll need to find hidden items that will increase the size of our wallet, which in turn will allow us to earn enough money to buy the item we need. It’s a roundabout way of doing things, but the end result remains the same.

While the facility is interconnected, the game does a good job of splitting the base up into a bunch of levels you’ll need to complete. There will usually be some sort of loop that will let you explore that part of Frontier Horizon, locate its hidden secrets, beat the boss and the move on, making it so you never have to visit that part of the base again. And if you do need to come back, it’s usually to buy one of those expensive items that you need, which is usually fairly close to the handy elevator. I was really impressed with the pacing of the game and how the backtracking is kept to a minimum.

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Another great thing about the Gemini II Squad is that it’s a bunch of people and not just one lone wolf fighting for survival. The game introduces you to a bunch of cool looking characters that you can switch between at almost any time. These different fighters will have their own stats and weapons, giving you a little variety in how you play the game. Some of them will even have a special move that will help you get through a tricky area. For example, there’s a playable robot that is perfect for one very poisonous section of the facility. You’ll even earn more playable characters when you beat the game, giving us plenty of incentive to play through the game multiple times.

And just when you get sick of the traditional platforming action, the game will throw a curve ball at you. You’ll suddenly be smashing things up with a mech or exploring a flooded part of the base with a submarine. And these aren’t short diversions, either, as some of these vehicle missions will last just as long as the on-foot missions. And before you ask, yes, the game does eventually turn into a traditional space shoot ‘em up, complete with new weapons and a bunch of aliens and asteroids to shoot at. For a game that looks so simple, B.I.O.T.A. has a surprising amount of variety.

Sadly, sometimes that variety can work against us. This is one of those games that introduces a bunch of new mechanics at the very end, and not all of them work. I was especially surprised that the final boss nixes all of the platforming action we’ve been doing and instead goes in a completely different direction, almost shifting the game into an entirely new genre. Don’t get me wrong, the end battle isn’t all that hard, so it’s not like there’s a huge learning curve. However, that almost makes it worse. Instead of being the culmination of everything we’ve learned up to that point, it feels like the developer tossed us into a completely different game. It would have been better if these gameplay elements were introduced earlier in the game and then revisited at the end.

My other complaint is that the monochromatic look sometimes makes it hard to see what you need to avoid. I found myself taking a lot of damage, not because I’m bad at platforming, but rather because the shots would blend in with the background. It doesn’t help that the checkpoints are few and far between. I kept running into the problem where I would hit a checkpoint with only one or two health bars, which means that you can’t get hit by a single enemy or it’s game over for the Gemini II Squad. The frustrating thing is that if we die and reload that checkpoint, we still only have one or two health bars. You can go all the way back to the surface base, where you can use a robot to refill the health, but that usually means losing a lot of progress. This is especially bad in the final stage, where the game will checkpoint out of the blue and not even give you a choice.

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That said, I do like the throwback look of B.I.O.T.A. This is obviously not authentic to the Game Boy experience, as the old school hardware would buckle under the pressure of trying to display that many sprites at once. But even if it’s not 100% accurate, this game is guaranteed to take you back to a time when side-scrolling platformers were all the rage. It’s also worth noting that you can cycle through a surprising amount of color variations, including some familiar classics like CGA and old terminal. I love this option, even if some of the selections make my eyes bleed.

Beyond the old school graphics, the real star here is the amazing chiptune soundtrack. From the exciting to the haunting to the mysterious, every song featured in this game is catchy and fits right in. Again, it’s not something the 8-bit systems would have been able to play three decades ago, but this soundtrack delivers the goods. And that’s true for almost every part of B.I.O.T.A. This is a great-playing action game that is paced perfectly and full of memorable moments. Even if you don’t have a lot of nostalgia for the early Game Boy, this game is incredibly easy to recommend.