Speebot Reviews

There is a good game somewhere inside Speebot, but that game is absolutely smothered under way, way too many levels and an all-pervading problem that gets a little better if you toggle an option in the game's settings. First off, the levels. There are 200 of them grouped into four zones, and every single one of those zones overstays its welcome horribly. Within those zones you are very, very slowly dripfed new mechanics and powerups which are spaced so far apart that everything prior feels done to death by the time you reach something new, and then you have to suffer through a couple levels which overdo the new thing so heavily that you're glad when it recedes into the background again. As you go through the zones, the difficulty constantly spikes and plummets, and not in a way which feels well-paced or engaging, but as though they were placed at semi-random with zero non-dev playtesting. It all evens out over time into a monotonous slog in a way that a greatly trimmed-down levelset would not, or even a split of the existing levels into a regular campaign and a challenge campaign. The other big issue is that, from the game's camera semi-overhead camera angle, it's often surprisingly difficult to gauge where exactly Speebot [i]is[/i] mid-air without a drop shadow directly underneath him or depth perception. There's a lot of very long, high jumps that are very easy to over(or under)shoot because you aren't sure if you're actually above the platform or not, and if you're jumping towards the camera, whether the nearer platform is too high for you or not. You can correct the first scenario with a rather ugly red landing indicator you can enable through the settings (I beat the game without it), but the second is more difficult. It'd actually be an ideal situation for anaglyph 3D or that discontinued Nvidia 3D Vision system, but sadly I doubt they'll ever be patched in. Deal with the first issue and maybe the second, and you're left with a very charming, well-optimized budget platformer. If Speebot were a bit better organised or slimmed down, it would be that better game, and it sucks because then it'd be a very easy recommendation for people into this stuff. As it stands, it's a never-ending, absolutely numbing gauntlet that's unfortunately only really of interest to the game's pre-release following and the community it came from.