Biodrone Battle Review

You have to give games a fair shake if you're a reviewer. Without getting bogged down in any murky 'ethics in videogame journalism' talk: if a reviewer hasn't spent enough time with a game, they can't provide an adequate response to it. However, there are always exceptions that prove the rule. Biodrone Battle is one such exception. I tried to sit down and play this game in earnest multiple times. I had good intentions. I wanted to give it its chance, but every time I did, I had my hopes dashed and the effort of trying to be fair to this game gave me a headache.

Biodrone Battle fancies itself as a robot arena fighting game with lasers, and while it does live up to that phrase by dint of including all of these components, the title achieves the amazing feat of making a game about robots fighting each other using laser projectiles a dull annoyance. A playthrough starts in a small room with a teleporter; from there, you'll head off to other rooms where you'll be briefed on your mission, usually to take out the occupying robots. Sounds simple, right? Sure, but good luck getting past any one of these rooms. I have tried several times, and I have not been able to clear the first section. I can just about kill the very first enemy, then the second enemy blows me to smithereens – every single time. I nearly lost the will to live after the 20th time but, luckily, I didn't kill myself, thanks to the game deciding to crash after every subsequent run. All the ingredients were there: robots and lasers are seldom not a winning combination, but this is sadly only a recipe for tedium and frustration.

Why? To cut right to the point, Biodrone Battle is no fun at all. If you ever do get past the seemingly unwinnable second opponent (fantastic structuring at play there...), you'll discover a bland, monotonous, one-note game that doesn't do anything right. Battles against other robots always go at two speeds – mindless clickfests so treacle-slow that you'll be able to physically feel your soul leave your body, and, as noted, lightning-fast battles that will kill you faster than you can say, “3, 2, 1, activate”. Trying to kill enemies by your laser at any rate is joyless. There is an easier way to win; where you can “absorb” your opponent in order to take on their form, effectively killing them, but this also just serves to make the game more mundane. This is the most damning thing you could ever say about a game: Biodrone Battle is not broken, lazily-made, or offensive. It is just poorly thought out, and as such, does not deserve to exist.

Cheekily, Biodrone Battle's Steam description features a quote from a Kotaku preview of the game, which describes it as “look[ing] well made and polished”, which deserves nothing but derisive snort-laughter. The graphics are, debatably, on par with Flash games from 2003, and even those had more charm – actually, Lego was doing some great stuff with Flash then, and it was free; this costs £4.99 of actual money and it looks like a high school project. The developers were shooting for a dark, industrial aesthetic, featuring poorly-lit, grungy and graffitied hallways, marked with hazard tape and billowing steam, but the whole thing feels cheap and flimsy – like putting Razer against Diotoir, Biodrone Battle breaks down in seconds against superior models. You'll never truly buy the darkened setting of this game – it's just too amateur.

The sound design is on the same level as the fun factor of this game – virtually non-existent. We get a few very low-key electronica-inspired tracks, but they're just as bland as the rest of this game. Oddly-put-together bleeps and bloops that create an atmosphere, not an ambience, that is guaranteed to leave the player cold and detach them from the game at hand. Once again, absolutely no thought was put in here.

Where's the joy? Where's the excitement? Videogames are meant to be a blank canvas where creator brings a world to life and player can live in it, not a grey prison of the mind. This is the gaming equivalent of porridge. If Steve Davis played videogames, this would be his favourite. This review might seem sparse, but there's honestly not much more to say. One last thing, though: if all games looked like Biodrone Battle, there would be no videogame industry – every player in it would be bored to suicide.