Mr. Robot

Mr. Robot
Developer:   Moonpod
Category:   Platform Puzzler
Released:   Jan 2007
Usual Price:   £5.99
Hours Played:  4
Controller Compatible: Yes
Rating:  0 Stars

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Mr Robot may not win prizes for detailed cutting edge graphics or for its sparse and minimal sound-effects. However, if you're willing to overlook that and like the idea of exploring a vast spaceship as a robot while solving block-pushing and sliding puzzles - with a hint of turn-based action thrown in - then you may want to give Mr Robot a try. 

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Menus, Progress & Stats

After you click on "Profile" at the start of the game, you are taken to a screen which holds general information such as the date of the saved games and various achievements. Other general unimportant info like game time, waypoints saved, lives lost etc is also displayed. There are no missions or levels; the game simply has a waypoint save system and you start from the last waypoint when you click "Continue." Most of the menus appear within the game as part of your PDA user-interface. Here, you may look at the map and, in very plain and text-based fashion, check things such as items and equipment in the inventory and the like.

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Gameplay

The game operates in isometric view and has you controlling a robot who roams around inside a huge metallic spaceship inhabited by other robots who set tasks and order you about. Invariably this involves sliding and jumping upon metal crates and cubes along with moving them by the use of a crane. Along the way, you'll need to hack into computers to get doors open etc and this involves journeying along a kind of circuit board and getting stuck into turn-based battles against various computer-based components. To help in this process, you'll be collecting and equipping weapons and armour upgrades that you pick up as you explore the ship.

The game starts off as deceptively simple - you slide things into spaces, but you gradually discover that the game has layers and is far more complex than that. RPG elements, where you'll need to familiarise yourself with an initially complicated inventory, are gradually drafted in but the game does a decent job in showing you how all this works. What items and programs are, how and when to equip them all become part of the learning process. Once figured out you are rewarded with a very interesting hybrid of a puzzle platformer and a turn-based battle game with those RPG elements thrown in.

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Conclusion

This is no easy block-sliding game like the first levels of MacGuffin's Curse or a platform puzzling romp like Trine. Although I've yet to hit anything too taxing, you'll need to be prepared for something fairly deep and more involved than those aforementioned games. Personally, I'm not usually into turn-based based games but Mr Robot does a very good job of making you care about those picked up items and what you're going to need to do with them later.

This, of course, is not to say that those block sliding/platform puzzling elements are weak. I thoroughly enjoyed working out all those problems and getting stuck in. You may instantly restart a room if you make an error and waypoints are spread out in nice bite-size chunks apart.

True, you do have to wade through quite a bit of unnecessarily tedious dialogue - and I did sometimes feel I was reading more than I was playing - but this is a minor gripe in an otherwise solid game.