Review by Nathan Hardisty
UK Certification 7+ | Region PAL | Developer Naked Guy Entertainment | Publisher Electronic Arts
Microbot is a twin-stick shooter that takes us places where gaming has rarely been. The player is transported into the human body, as a microbiotic robot designed to destroy the previous generation’s microbots, which have gone rogue. It’s an interesting premise and it certainly explores areas and aesthetics that video games don't normally venture, but in a nutshell, it falls oh so short of its design intentions.
The main gameplay should be solid, but it has this loose feel around it that separates it from such twin-stick shooters as Pixeljunk Shooter and Geometry Wars. It never reaches the same tactile heights and generally withers in monotony at times. There’s no flair or originality, there’s not even any refinement in ideas about twin-stick shooters. Your bullets have a short range unless you upgrade them, and even then they just feel weak.
The game is based around collecting atoms (which is a stupid currency for such a high context) and then spending them on upgrades that take - to be blunt - your little weapons and turns them into big weapons, although they never pack much of a punch. Not super-powered or actually upgraded, it’s like they start you off with deliberately weak weapons and you just have to make your way up to normality. There’s no sense of progression and so no motivation to go out and seek these atoms. In fact, there’s the magic word: progression. There’s no sense of pacing in the main game either and it all comes down to crawling through voids and bumping into the occasional enemy to ruin your day. Sometimes it changes and a little spark will appear. Something that screams of something more, a little note of potential, such as when you’re being chased by nasties as you’re being catapulted by blood streams.
But it’s rarely exciting. In a full hour there was around one or two instances where I was actually enjoying myself. For the rest of that time it’s cold stone dead tedious. It’s worse still that the game’s environment doesn’t effectively make up for this, since many games make their worlds exciting to explore instead of exciting to interact with. It’s such a shame then to see the game shift from a bloody red environment and barely change into anything else aesthetically after that. I’m not even going to mention what it changes to as it’s that insulting to the player. A basic colour change is all I will say.
There is something in Microbot that perhaps is worth salvaging. Similar to the ways of Portal, there is a relationship with another being that doesn’t rely on dialogue. Such as with Half-Life 2 in fact, I grew to appreciate this guy not through his dialogue (he didn’t have any) but through his useful qualities. I made friends with a white blood cell. I was able to fire a harpoon into him and tether him around like a wrecking ball, before unleashing him on the nasties. I don’t often see a relationship in a game that doesn’t rely on discourse but on its interactive output.
Other than a shining design element, Microbot is a tedious shooter full of repetitive elements and dull aesthetics that do not do the context justice. This is the perfect example of a game that needed a lot of care of attention to flourish, but just didn’t get that nurturing. I do hope the developer takes these criticisms into a sequel or into another product, as it’s clear they have the vision. What was needed was a little more time.
• Microbot is available on the Xbox LIVE Arcade for 800 Microsoft Points, and the PlayStation Store for £6.29.