Demo Dive: ROBOBEAT

Boogie down to the rhythm of a semi-auto

EDIT: This demo dive was written before the game released. If the final game is like the demo, it’s some good stuff. You can still download the demo.

There is an inherent rhythm to games. Timing your actions in real-time genres is very important. When you get into a game you get “into the groove”, and some combos in fighting games, like in Marvel Vs Capcom 3, have repeating beats and strict timings that make them sound like beats to a song. It was only natural that this concept would be made an explicit mechanic in games.

ROBOBEAT takes the rhythm concept and applies it to a first person shooter. You go through randomly picked pre-made rooms fighting different enemies, picking up weapons along the way, unlocking new ones, unlocking goodies and getting points.

Unlike the other two rhythm-based first-person shooters that go for a metal soundtrack, ROBOBEAT opts for a synth-wave cyberpunk sound. You’ll be timing your shots to the driving, mid-tempo beats of synths and drum machines all underscored by catchy, sinister basslines.

The in-game selection of tracks is banging. Each song has a different tempo and sound to it, but they’re all coherently synthy. They sound great and make a perfect backing track to shoot to.

 If you want a more personalized touch, the game also has a custom track feature. It allows you to import an audio file and it automatically determines its BPM and creates a matching beat chart for it. It worked very well with the song I decided to import.

Injecting some culture into this game

These songs are in service of the main gameplay element: shooting. Your cursor has a beat indicator. When the beats line up, you fire. Fire off-beat and you do almost no damage. At first, I thought this system would feel odd or restrictive, but it works perfectly. Like I mentioned in the intro, there’s an inherent rhythm to action games, and timing your shots to the beat here feels like a natural extension of timing to account for recoil or reloads in other games.

The gun selection in the demo is small, but interesting. You get to try the revolver, a ricochet-shot pistol, a shotgun and, my personal favorite, a ping-pong paddle. Yes, a ping-pong paddle. You serve, then get three shots to the beat with the last shot being an explosion. It’s a creative weapon that captures the feeling of “shooting to the beat” more than the conventional guns.

The Hero appears. THE HERO APPEARS.

There’s a variety of enemies to shoot at. Small pink people that run up to you and karate chop, small pink people with wizard hats that shoot magic missiles, and floating green things that also shoot projectiles at you. There are also flying pink speakers that shoot larger, slow projectiles, turrets, and a boss.

The enemies aren’t much to write home about. They look fine, but they don’t pose much of a challenge. The pink guys are very passive. They spawn and before they even act or become a threat you’ve already put a bullet in their head and sent them back to where they came from. I had to purposefully sit in an arena and look at them to see what they did. Turns out they half-heartedly run at you and attack once every few beats.

The floating green vinyl toys were more understandable, but equally harmless. They shoot projectiles you can easily dodge or parry and have a giant, glowing eye as a weak spot. They attack more often than the basic pink enemies, but they don’t seem to shoot the player. They fire their projectiles in your general direction without really aiming. They’re not trying to hit you. If they do, they’d probably apologize and promise not to do it again.

In general, I think the game needs a bump up in difficulty. Sure, the demo only shows you up to difficulty 2/5, but even the boss wasn’t a challenge. You can parry all his attacks with a very generous window and counterattack for massive damage. If the enemies were made more aggressive, it’d be more interesting.

What makes the game interesting, other than shooting the pacifist enemies, is the style system. Like Ultrakill, the game gives you points for being cool while you shoot. You can go on a jump pad and get points for a mid-air kill, snipe an enemy from far away and get rewarded or do a number of other things for points. The game calls these “tricks” and they’re fun to discover and perform.

Your tricks are catalogued in a barely-visible ticker at the top of the screen. They’re shown in small, plain text with little to no celebration. I didn’t notice them at first, until I happened to look up in a moment of downtime and realized someone was keeping track of my points. The game doesn’t show a points total, either.

If you squint you can kind of see it there

There are other similarities to Ultra Kill, especially in the movement. You can slide and you have a ground pound which sends enemies flying into the air, where you then get bonus points for shooting them down. This combination of stylish shooting and rhythm makes for a very fun and engaging gameplay loop, even if the enemies are pushovers.

Basic movement is good, as well. The player’s movement speed feels quick, you’ll never feel like you’re dodging projectiles that can easily outrun you. There’s a dash that’s quick and responsive, good for getting out of harm’s way in a flash. Whenever you dash there’s a cool soundwave effect on screen in the direction you’re dashing.

The thing with all these cool movement options is the game’s difficulty. I never felt like I needed to push the movement to the limit to survive because the game didn’t expect me to. I got through the demo only moving side to side and jumping every now and then. I used the ground pound, dashes and wall clings for fun and to see what they were like, not for any real reason.

To aid you in looking cool, the arenas have different set-ups you can use to get fancy. I mentioned jump pads in passing. You step on them and get launched high into the air to rain death on everything. There are also rails in some arenas that you can grind and shoot from for big points. The obligatory explosive barrel, an FPS staple, is here as well, and it sends enemies into the air so you can shoot them down like clay pigeons. What environmental interaction is there is fun, I just wish there were more of it. More rails, especially. Getting headshots while grinding is a ton of fun.

The last paragraph explains the arenas but makes them sound more dynamic than they really are. I only found the rails in one room, and the jump pads were in another. Most arenas are just sort of there, and you don’t interact much with them. There isn’t any verticality, either, which is baffling since you have great air movement.

The aesthetic the game is going for is an interesting one. The design and UI is very dark and monochrome. The levels are black and gray with some grungey accents like grayscale graffiti. This helps the neon enemies pop out, but it’s a little dreary. I think it’s going for a late 2000’s dark look that reminds me of some of the later Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games for some reason.

It may be the ramps.

In my opinion, the game should embrace the Tony Hawk thing a bit more. It even has tricks and a counter. Make the trick counter more prominent, maybe take some “inspiration” from the way THPS does it. Maybe even add a combo system? I’m personally biased in favor of combo systems. I love those things, but if being stylish and scoring is an integral part of the experience, treat it like one. Celebrate whenever the player does something cool, instead of putting it at the top of the screen with no aplomb like it’s a grocery list.

ROBOBEAT is a fun game that needs some tweaks. Fortunately, it’s still in development and taking feedback. It has a very fun, solid core, great movement, a killer soundtrack and interesting weapons. It just needs to embrace its good aspects and elevate them. Make the trick ticker more obvious and congratulate the player for doing something impressive. Add more environmental toys to the arenas and, again, make the enemies more dangerous.

With these few tweaks, this game would go from good to amazing. Even then, it’s still worth checking out, and I recommend you download the demo.

If I had a nickel for every time a first person rhythm shooter that used metal music, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice, right?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some work to do.