Hoptron 5000 - The Samurai Robot Ninja Bunny on a Rampage Review

I have two pet bunnies. Before you start, I’m well aware that rabbits are a possible source of food, references to that aren’t actually as funny as you think they are. What people often don’t realise about rabbits though is that they can be quite vicious if they need to be. They’re adorable little bastards when they’re on the ground, but for the love of God, don’t try to pick up a rabbit that doesn’t want to be picked up. As they’re prey animals, they will assume they’re about to be eaten and scratch your eyes out. Monty Python had it right with the The Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog. Anyway, I digress, the point is that rabbits are actually pretty badass.

Hoptron, the star of Hoptron 5000 - The Samurai Robot Ninja Bunny on a Rampage (Hoptron 5000 from here on), is no exception to the badass bunny rule. He’s all the things in the title, so he’s nimble, hard as nails and full of attitude. He’s exactly the kind of character that you would have seen in a scrolling beat-em-up in the ‘90s in fact, and you can see that there’s a degree of influence taken from that genre here in Robotsauce’s debut title. The twist here though is that they decided to do that genre without the scrolling part.

Essentially, each level is a single screen and the enemies come to you in waves. As the titular Hoptron, you need to slice and dice the enemies as they appear. If you didn’t skip the intro video, then you’ll know that these enemies, while they look like fruit and vegetables, are actually Nazis. The first end of level boss is the “Watermelo-nazi”. You couldn’t make this stuff up. I mean, Robosauce clearly did; this isn’t a documentary, but you get what I mean, this is a strange game.

The delivery style is very akin to a lot of Newgrounds animations where the characters are presented in an unnaturally blasé state with important plot explanations skipped in favour of “well, just because or something”. The suggestion is that characters and narrators are always drunk. This was amusing when we started seeing it in the ‘90s from animators new to the art form, but it just feels a bit lazy in 2016.

That doesn’t take away from the action of the game. This is a fast paced game with enemies coming at you from all angles. As with any mobile game that needs a character to be moved, the controls will take some getting used to and they will never be fluid or accurate, so you’re fighting against them as well as the in-game enemies. I’d have liked to see controller support to make it easier but none of the controllers I have (Moga and a PS4 Pad on a Sony tablet) were recognised. Hopefully, this will be added in an update.

Like those fighters of the ‘90s that Hoptron 5000 takes its cues from, this is a tough game to beat. It took me about six attempts just to beat the first boss. It doesn’t help that Hoptron himself is relatively weak until you’ve upgraded him. And this is where we see the free-to-play aspect coming in. You can simply grind and get upgrades through “Awesome points” but the best upgrades come from microtransactions. You can also buy the Awesome Points if grinding is too much like hard work, which for many of us, it probably will be. If I wasn’t reviewing this, I probably would have given up making him strong enough to compete with the game much earlier. Sadly, in a world where people routinely pirate 99p apps, this is how mobile developers, especially the smaller ones, need to make money.

That said, with enough practice, I would expect skilled players to be able to complete the game without paying anything. Dummies like me who never got past the first part of Ecco the Dolphin on the Mega Drive are going to struggle. Overall, whilst the microtransactions are irksome and the presentation could be better, I thought this was a fun little game. Like you expect from a mobile title, it provides small morsels of bite sized fun that you can enjoy while waiting for a bus etc. It’s not going to keep you occupied for hours, but that’s not what it’s designed for. If you want to spend ten minutes slicing up Nazi fruit (and who doesn’t) then this is a good game to turn to.