ROBOBEAT Review

Recently, many titles have pushed the idea of combining rhythm games with first-person shooters, allowing players to shoot a beat. A new one has come across the GameGrin desk. ROBOBEAT is the latest title by Simon Fredholm, and the question is if this is a beat you can tap your feet to, or are you doing the lawn mower move in the corner?

ROBOBEAT styles itself as a roguelike rhythm shooter where you take the role of Ace, a robot gunslinger, hunting for the eccentric Frazzer, another robot. The plot is relatively simple, but there’s a hidden mystery for you to uncover and a whole lot of questions — for instance, where are all the people?

Now, I should mention that I suck at keeping a rhythm; it was an issue I found while playing Metal: Hellsinger, so ROBOBEAT needed to sell me on the concept. I struggled to keep the beat initially, but once I found a song I gelled with, everything changed… for about an hour. See, the game works by having you time your shots to the beat of a song. If you hit the timing, then you’ll do damage, but go too soon or too late, and you won’t. 

The beat you need to follow is shown to you by your reticule pulsating, but at the end of the day, you’re better served tapping your foot and using your ears. The problems arise when the environments get busy and full of enemies. ROBOBEAT wants you to shoot with style as well as with the beat, so there are plenty of jumps and slides that help you get a better score. 

When you’re playing the slower songs, it isn’t too bad, but when it's one of the faster beats and you're desperately moving around to try and stay alive, then you have no chance of remembering everything. The fun you’ll have is also heavily dependent on what weapons you get, as some will completely ruin the experience. For instance, the revolvers are pretty simple: they shoot when you pull the trigger. But then you have something like the paddle that launches a ball on the first press and then hits it at the enemy on the second, and you have to press the button on two separate beats. 

However, if you have the right guns and the right songs, then you can get in the groove, and it all comes together really well. This is helped by the ability to add your own songs, meaning you can shoot to anything you like — you could even relive that scene from Shrek with “I Need a Hero”. If you don’t want to add a song, there are 38 different tracks included in the game, and they all offer different speeds and you can swap songs whenever you want. 

Of course, ROBOBEAT is also a roguelike, so you don’t always get the guns you want and have to make do; this also means that no two levels and no group of enemies are ever really the same. Each run is separated into rooms, where you have to kill groups of enemies until you have the option to go through one of the doors. These doors can lead to more enemies, gifts, or more, depending on the symbols. 

On top of the music, you also have the design of the game, which screams the old business Laser Quest to me. If you’ve never heard of Laser Quest, then think of bright neon lights in dark hallways and rooms filled with barrels. It works with the constant beat, and the enemies also being neon helps them to stand out, which you’ll need. This is because you’re trying to keep a beat, so it becomes harder to focus on where the enemies actually are. Thankfully, while you do get a score at the end of each room, you don’t lose points for missing. 

Overall, ROBOBEAT took some getting used to, at least for me. However, once I got into the groove, I found myself having fun and tapping my feet to the beat. There are some issues, namely the steep learning curve of coping with everything happening on screen while also trying to recognise all the visual and auditory clues. Not only that, the actual enemies you fight aren’t all that interesting to look at after a while, and the relatively few chances to heal, combined with a lack of boss checkpoints, can be a pain… but that’s just roguelikes.