Following the releases of Nintendo’s Super Metroid in 1994 and Konami’s Castlevania: Symphony of the Night in 1999, the term Metroidvania was coined for 2D action games that put a great deal of focus on exploration. Many games have since come and gone, with few managing to truly capture the essence that made those games so great.
Unfortunately Bad Bots fails to deliver.
Rather than promote exploration, the game exercises a tediously repetitive sequence of entering rooms filled with killer robots which you then kill to advance through to do it all over again. For five hours. Sometimes you’ll find new guns in these rooms, but most of the time you’ll be backed up against a wall fighting a handful of robots.
You play as Sam McRae, a mechanist who awakens from cryosleep on board a spaceship that has been overrun by malicious robots. Sam is challenged with fighting through hoards of robots to find survivors and stop the ship from crashing into Earth. The premise, as nice as it is, serves as more of a guidance tool than a tangible plot. Every so often a box of dialog will pop up, helping Sam along as he continues on his journey.
Gameplay is simple and easy to take control of. You can move left to right, crouch and jump with the W, A, S, D keys. Sam can aim in a nearly 360-degree radius with the mouse. Guns are fired with the left click and melee attacks are done with the right. Steam’s details of the game suggest that a controller can be used in lieu of a keyboard/mouse combo but repeated attempts led nowhere.
Health and ammo are found in abundance, making it hard to ever really feel invested in Sam’s fight for survival. Despite its faults, the game does have a challenge mode that does help redeem itself.
Featuring three levels of increasing difficulty, the challenges pin the player against waves upon waves of killer robots for sixty seconds in a contained area. It’s a shame there are only three levels, as this is probably the game’s best quality.
But Bad Bot isn’t a bad game. The art style is a nice throwback to SNES/Genesis-era games and the controls do their job well. It is however, an extremely safe game. Never taking any kind of risk to differentiate itself from its predecessors, the game ultimately falls short at being interesting or memorable. At best, it ends up being a nice little distraction during a lunch break, but nothing more outside of that.
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