RoboPhobik Reviews

Great game, got hooked on it real quick. If you havent already, id definitely give it a try

Great game, it's really fun! I love the story and all the playable characters involved. The graphics are good and allow to run the game smoothly, really appreciated!

RoboPhobik is one of those obscure great titles that deserves more attention. The gameplay is great and unique. Love the story as well.

Good concept with an interesting plot and fun dialogue (I laughed out loud several times), but it's honestly far too brutally difficult. That's my one complaint about this game, which I otherwise would have loved. I struggled a lot after the first handful of zones, even with the enemy respawn time set to Low. I ended up cheating to push through and see the ending because I liked the characters so much, but then discovered that I needed to rescue all of the scientists to see the actual ending -- which likely would have explained a handful of mysteries that were left unresolved in my playthrough. Oh well.. there's no way I'm ready to go back and do that, especially after suffering through the last few zones and the final boss battle which killed me even while cheating -- I'm honestly not sure that fourth form is possible if you're playing legitimately. This is a good game at its core, so I hate that I can't recommend it, but it honestly needs more generous difficulty settings in order to be playable -- at least by casual players like me. Maybe I'm not the target demographic for a game like this, but I really wish I was.

[b] Review updated to better reflect the developer's efforts [/b] RoboPhobik is a decidedly basic overhead shooter with a sprinkling of features found in other genres. You play as one of several characters as you traverse a city populated by robots to rescue other humans and defeat the big boss PAL 9000. While interesting in concept, the execution is not the best and some features are rather basic. I think the best comparison is to certain games from the rogue-lite genre, specifically the indie game Dungeons of Dredmor or like Azure Dreams from the PS1, though this game does not feature the typical feature of losing all--or nearly all--progress when you die. >The story starts fairly slow, and has rather rough dialogue--I suspect due to wanting to keep conversations short and concise. Characters fall into stereotypes and do not have much in terms of deep personality, but in a genre such as this it is not that important. The story improves as the game continues, and sheds much of its quirkiness as important story beats are reached. >The graphics are passable with fairly low poly models and extremely plain textures being carried by the lighting and shadows to give the game a largely uninteresting visual style. Not good or bad, just...there. Oddly enough, the faces have the most attention in terms of animation while lacking almost any distinctive look for the characters. Eyes and mouths are basically just slightly different shapes painted on to their faces. All in all, the visuals give you just the information you need, but little else. >The level design ranges from bland to fairly good, with plenty of nonsensical room decor and ridiculous floor plans, and many rooms are overflowing with enemy spawners. This makes many maps feel like they were randomly-generated instead of hand-crafted. Level quality, difficulty, and length vary wildly with some of the easiest and shortest levels coming immediately after a ridiculously long and difficult level. There is no rhyme or reason, and can make replaying certain levels for upgrades less exciting. >While the controls are perfectly fine--the game really only uses a handful of buttons so this is unsurprising--the default movement of the character is odd. The game is heavily grid-based both for the player and the enemies. However, there is a drift feature causes your character to slowly drift into the center of the square they are walking on. I find the drift feature to be janky, often making you drift into traps or miss otherwise easy shots with your weapon. Turning off the drift will let you control your position in a more traditional way. [b] Developer quickly updated the game to make auto-centering optional and this helps remedy many issues I found with the game. [/b] >There is a fairly high enemy variety in the game, both in design and mechanics. Some enemies do no damage and only block you, while others chase you down, and other still have shots that can turn once to try and hit you. Sometimes the enemies compliment each other well, while others can be overwhelming together with their numbers, capabilities, and health. Of course, there is also stronger versions of previous enemies you will encounter later on. >The upgrade system for weapons and armor is okay. You basically rescue scientists to increase your weapon power, armor, and skills, with health and armor shared across the characters. However, the characters also have an extremely rudimentary level system. All level ups seemed to do is slightly increase maximum health, and you have to grind each character's level individually. The upgrades from rescued scientist are permanent, as long as you finish the level. Character levels seem to persist, even after dying. >The combat system is both the defining feature of the game, and one of the most oddly executed features in it. By default, enemy spawners (called seeds) do not pause when you take no action like the enemies do. To explain: when you approach a seed, it will release an enemy that will attack (or chase) you. If there happens to be another seed nearby, it will also spawn an enemy. Once spawned, their seed will begin to countdown before it resets and can be triggered again. You can disable the real-time counting, making the seed counters follow the same time rules as the enemies. This lets the player focus on making more tactical moves and attacks at their pace, rewarding players who plan well instead of making rash, lucky decisions. [b] Another issue quickly fixed by adding an option for having either pausing or real-time seed counters. I find the pausing option better, but kudos for letting any who would prefer real-time keep that option as well. The developer also added an option to modify countdown timers as a good way to reduce difficulty.[/b] After a couple of simple quality of life updates from a very responsive and obviously passionate developer, the game is improved a good bit while not taking away from the initial idea. It is still relatively simple, but that is absolutely not a bad thing. Having played through more of the game and played withe updates, I would absolutely recommend this game for fans of less hardcore rogue-like games, and those that adore quirky indie games.

Good game even if I don't really like the music. - The game was fun - It got hard - Then I decided to slow down and learn the strategies - Could continue and game got even better