14 DAY TRIAL // 
As mobile gaming keeps growing, and wave after wave of inevitable ports flood the already crowded shelves of Valve's distribution service Steam, the dregs of society slowly seep into our lives.
Fortunately, we've yet to see the ilk of Kim Kardashian: Hollywood make the jump, but there are plenty of other examples of lazy ports coming to PC just because an apk file can run just fine on Windows.
There are, however, occasional gems making the jump from mobile to PC, and at the end of the day we all have our guilty pleasures and we play whatever we want.
That's why I wanted to play Robotex. It looked like a colorful side-scrolling shooter, and it's been quite a while since I got my hands on one. I was also curious to see how a mobile shooter translates to bigger screens and what impact the opportunity to have a proper control scheme has on the gameplay.
Gameplay
I made a huge mistake. Unfortunately, not only is Robotex a bland and uninspired game, it suffered no modifications in its transition to PC.
In any case, I decided against abandoning it after the first try, and I stuck with it, trying to see whether there was more under its surface than my initial contact had suggested.
The premise is very simple: we ruled Earth, we got bored, ran out of resources, and now we have to find a new home. Humanity sets out to space to find a suitable planet to exploit, and you are part of an expedition tasked with slaying the many monsters inhabiting the hostile new environment.
Robotex is a two-dimensional side-scrolling shooter, where your tiny robot space ship advances automatically, and you only have two buttons to worry your pretty little head with, jumping and shooting.
Sure, jumping is done via a jetpack that propels you and even offers you a bit of inertia in order to add some imprecision to the mix, and the shooting mainly consists of launching a slow, lagging rocket, but hey, interstellar travel is expensive, and mankind ran out of cash when it came to outfitting you.
The plot is far-fetched as best. One would argue that the most important part of the mission is securing recon information and establishing a foothold on the alien planet, which would mean that the forces intended to pacify the fauna would get the most state of the art equipment available.
Instead, some drunk engineer decided to force you to play Flappy Bird rather than pilot a top-notch drone, in order to be able to whine about the arduous process of taming the new home and to earn political points for the brave and nigh-impossible act of actually managing to kill anything, and not instantly plummeting to death while piloting the horrendously designed probe.
What's more, the team behind the craft you're assigned to in Robotex were most likely fans of the stripped-down and streamlined gameplay of Flappy Bird, aiming to distill motion and present it in its purest form.
The fact that Robotex is a worse game than Flappy Bird can only mean that it's actually a simulation video game aiming to show how government is created.
All joking aside, it's really unfortunate that the indie side-scroller plays so badly. I really wanted to like it, but it's just impossible.
It's a lazy port that changes absolutely nothing from the mobile version, and has the user interface of a 1998 Flash website using programmer art and various gradient fills from Microsoft Word clip art.
The visuals in the actual gameplay moments are colorful and could be passable, but they lack personality and don't really fit into anything.
It feels like the whole game is put together from some disparate parts, without any effort to achieve any sense of cohesion whatsoever.
The most annoying thing, by far, is the fact that you don't have any control over what's going on. It's a devolution of gaming, replacing proper input with quick time events in hopes of getting the attention of people who never played anything and consider motor coordination a preposterous prerequisite for doing anything in life.
Just like in Flappy Bird, your mission is to avoid some obstacles by pressing a button, only the imprecision of doing that make the whole thing feel like an ordeal, instead of rewarding good timing.
You can even use your jetpack to completely disappear from the playable area, which is completely dumbfounding, as you have no idea where you are during the process.
Furthermore, your jetpack works in mysterious ways, sometimes getting you off the ground and propelling you into outer space, and other times not being able to move you one inch.
It's most likely something to do with your current height, above which you can only get by using the momentum built up from reaching that altitude while starting from the ground, but it just feels like it's random and the result of bad design.
In addition to this, the automated movement is also annoying as hell. Some of the time, you're going to have to hang back and wait for a couple of seconds for something to drop out of nowhere, behind some conveniently placed obstacles that you can afterwards destroy, in order to start your unending progress all over again.
But the way movement is done is horrendous. It takes a really long time to fire up your engines, and whenever you hit something, you get knocked back, which combined with the imprecision of the boost means that a lot of times you'll get stuck or die due to poor controls.
“It feels like the whole game is put together from some disparate parts, without any effort to achieve any sense of cohesion whatsoever.”
The sad reality of having to actually synchronize your movements in order to get through some areas means that the gameplay is more akin to that of Surgeon Simulator and other similar gag games, where the lack of a proper control scheme is the actual gameplay, only Robotex isn't supposed to be an amusing thing to play while screaming, which you can then post on YouTube to entertain children.
Sure, there are plenty of levels to go through, but with such atrocious controls and lack of actual features, why would you?
Robotex seems like the kind of game tailor-made for people who hate themselves and desire to suffer. You get stuck all the time, there is no sense of gameplay flow, which is the only thing automated runners have going for them.
It doesn't even look amateurish, apart from the vivid visuals, that feel like they were created for a completely different project, as everything about Robotex is done wrong.
Additionally, it also has an intro that comes out of nowhere, featuring some stock photos badly superimposed over a tech demo for a galaxy panorama asset pack, with nothing to say and some weird angles and cuts, looking like it's made in a hurry for a child's school project.
The Good
- Vibrant graphics
The Bad
- Horrible controls
- Ugly interface
- Frustrating gameplay
- No music
- Bad overall design
Conclusion
It feels like an unfinished student's project, and I don't even want to know how the imprecise controls work on a tiny mobile device's screen, especially when you really have to get lucky at times, in order to get through some of the tiny, passable gaps, barely squeezing your ship between two environmental hazards.
I was attracted by the colorful visuals, even if they feel like a mashup of several different designs that don't really go together, expecting a tight shooter, and was left disappointed by what seems to be an incomplete prototype that doesn't yet have all the mechanics implemented.
You can't steer the robot, if you touch a cloud you die, stuff suddenly collapses and kills you, it's basically a quick time event cinematic with lousy flow and no testing, that makes even Flappy Bird look like a game with some though put into it.
