After beating both One Finger Death Punch and Mortal Kombat, I decided that I wasn’t quite ready to get off my ‘Pick It Up And Have A Play’ horse yet, and played an arcade game I downloaded sometime in 2013: Shoot Many Robots.
This game reminds me of Metal Slug, and with good reason –
it is a classic action platformer. You run, gun and jump your way to victory,
using power-ups and upgrades to your weapons. Your enemies are robots, but
curiously enough for a video game, most of them seem to have been designed look
like they were built for function, not combat. They’re dangerous enough, but
it’s a refreshing change to fight something that doesn’t look like it was
deliberately designed to kill you.
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| Side-Scrolling BadAssery. What's not to love? |
Make no mistake, this game is good fun. There’s a reason
this was so popular in the 80s and 90s: The format worked so well. You run
through a Post Industrial environment shooting anything that moves, and picking
up anything that doesn’t move. The design of the characters and music put you
in the shoes of beer-swilling rednecks who’d love to be doing nothing better,
which adds to the light-hearted yet determined nature of the game. And as with
the old games, Shoot Many Robots will let you get through the first few levels
without trying, before forcing you to think for a moment about what you’re
doing and how you’re going to beat the next level. There are obligatory boss
battles, and even though some of them have a kind of ‘recycled’ feel to them,
this is nothing new for this kind of game either.
But as this game is on the Xbox 360, the developers had to
make some token effort to innovate, and they do this by putting in an economy
with which to buy new weapons and equipment, a ‘level-up’ system similar to
Charlie Murder. As far as I know, all the latter does is unlock some of the
game’s later gear. Your characters can carry two weapons: A primary gun with
unlimited ammo, and a secondary weapon which is usually more powerful but with
limited ammo. But it’s the helmet, armour and trousers where it starts to get
interesting, as they affect the way the character moves. Some gear speeds you
up; others have more damage resistance but slow you down and can lock some
actions like slides. Certain upgrades allow jumps to resist gravity, and you
can even acquire a jetpack to keep you in the air for a few seconds. This is
more useful in some situations than others. At times you’ll love floating over
your enemies bringing death from above; at others you’ll miss the tightness of
the controls of the regular gear.
The game also has some multiplayer modes including up to
4-player co-op. I didn’t bother with this, as I don’t usually play games with
people these days. I would imagine it would be somewhere between having a laugh
with a few friends, and a frustrating pain in the bum as you have to wait for
each other to upgrade your gear before you can actually play the game. I think
it would have to be played in the right spirit, and with the right people, but
if you can find both of those things you should have a good night in at least.
Having been watching YouTube’s The Completionist, I’m
developing an appreciation for the kind of gamer who wants to power through
games and unlock everything. It’s not my style – I prefer to go get to the end
of the game once then come back to it if I really
want to – but I can see why some people make that their hobby. Shoot Many
Robots is a game that caters for both demographics; getting through the game on
Normal difficulty was fine for me, but the
individual levels give you a star rating out of 5 and maxing out all the stars
on a higher difficulty level will probably give the game a lot more mileage for
the completionists among us.
So, quite a good game. Not the best, but far from the worst,
and it’s done it’s job for me.
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