Good Robot (PC, Early Access)

Playing the first 5 minutes of Good Robot was like hearing from an old friend I had lost touch with, but couldn’t for the life of me remember why. Everything about it gave me an immediate sense of familiar, nostalgic pleasure; the controls, the gameplay, weapons, bosses…everything was just how I remembered it, despite never having played Good Robot in my life.

The Good, the Bad, the Robot

Robot Style

Speaking of the hats, like everything else in the game, there is no information on them whatsoever, which is kind of annoying. To be fair though, the lack of info is par for the course in Good Robot, so at least the game is consistent. Especially early on, you are confronted with a lot of different hats at different prices, and I couldn’t figure out why a $70 halo was a better or worse purchase than a set of $30 cat ears. Eventually I surmised that the price is directly related to cosmetics, so basically whichever hat you think is the funniest is the one you spend your hard-earned coin on. Personally, I thought the Russian style hat was hilarious, so I wore that most of the time, since every hat has the exact same function no matter which one you choose.

Mechanical Mechanics

The game also mixes up the maps and enemy placement every time you die, which is important since every time you die you start over from scratch. This isn’t as bad as it sounds, however, and I found myself getting exponentially better with each successive restart as I honed my skills with my favorite weapons and upgrades and recognized how to defeat the bosses. After about 5 restarts, I began to really get the hang of it, earning achievements and taking down bosses without too much trouble. For a while.

Just when you start to get lazy though, the game throws some new enemy type or new difficulty your way. The electrified levels, for example, really make you pay attention to what you are doing, and drives home how well (or poorly) you’ve been maneuvering your little robot around as you lose big-time health for touching any walls. Suddenly, the secondary weapon’s recoil can get you killed, and even firing your regular weapon needs to get pretty precise, since every shot slowly pushes you away from your target, often into an electrified wall.

The weapons also have a lot of variety, although some of them are kind of blah. The soundwave blaster seems like a poor man’s machine gun for example, and a few other weapons seemed a little too close to others. Still, once you find your favorites you can upgrade your firing speed and some other attributes, and the combat is fast and satisfying. Your primary weapon is weaker, and your secondary is usually a shotgun or missile type weapon, often with an area of effect and a short cooldown. There are a lot of fun combos to find, purchase, and play around with, and finding your favorites is a very enjoyable task.

There are also some upgrades available for a price, and everything at the stores gets more expensive every time you purchase anything. The upgrades consist of movement speed, shield strength, a wider flashlight cone for exposing enemies, new weapons, faster firing rate, and more. As upgrades get more expensive and enemies get more numerous and deadly, making these simple decisions takes a bit more thought.

The Sound and the Fury and the Humor

Lastly, the game is surprisingly funny. The menu and weapon descriptions made me audibly chuckle a few times, and the “headlines” that scroll across the screen at vending machines are pretty comical as well. I wasn’t expecting that, and it’s nice to have a chuckle in between hectic levels of full on robot destruction.