PC Game Fun Time

A fun little Flash game by the name of Robokill made the rounds on the Internet a couple of weeks ago, and it’s easy to see why. The game has high production values (for a Flash game, anyway), a leveling-up mechanic, a not-too-simplified inventory management system, and a fun combat mechanic. It’s well worth a play if you haven’t played it already, at least to the end of the free levels anyway. It’s good in many ways, but the one aspect I want to talk about, the combat mechanics, is great, and that’s what I’m going to focus the rest of this post on.

You control your robot’s movement with four directional keys (either WASD or the arrow keys). As is pretty standard, holding down two adjacent directional keys will let you move in a diagonal direction. Firing is controlled completely separately from movement; your robot shoots wherever you point the mouse cursor. It’s this freedom that makes the combat so much fun, which is no surprise since I’ve seen the mechanic before in another game I enjoyed very much: Geometry Wars. Robokill is basically Geometry Wars with an inventory/weapon customization component tacked on and the endless levels replaced with discrete rooms. I like the former modification, but not necessarily the latter.

In case you’ve never played Geometry Wars, there’s a clone of it for the PC called Grid Wars that I highly recommend. It’s actually better than Geometry Wars in several respects; having played all of the various versions, I prefer Grid Wars. What can I say? It just plays better with a mouse, although the version of Geometry Wars for the Nintendo DS does have a nice leveling up/collecting mechanic that persists across individual plays much like Robokill.

The main reason I like both Robokill and Grid Wars is the mechanic of freeform movement combined with independent freeform shooting. It’s a perfect recipe for hectic fun. In either game, if you stand still, you’re toast (in Grid Wars you’ll be swarmed, while in Robokill you’ll be swarmed and shot to pieces). So you always have to keep moving, and if you have any sense of how to play these games well, you know you have to keep moving towards areas where the concentration of enemies is lowest. In really crowded levels, this takes the form of blasting out a safe corridor to pass through. In levels where enemies are more concentrated, you’re generally running in one direction while shooting at the huge horde of enemies following closely behind you.

It’s the really hectic moments that combine both situations that are the most fun — when you’re being pursued by a large horde but also simultaneously having to deal with small groups of enemies along the path that you are running along. The only solution is to rapidly oscillate the direction that you’re shooting in, effectively dividing your fire — say, 30% toward clearing a path, 70% toward thinning the horde behind you — in an effort to find the formula that allows you to survive the longest in each given situation. Oh, and all the shooting in the world won’t do much good if your aim is off and you aren’t making each and every shot count.

Ultimately, both games have their merits. I like the persistence of Robokill’s customization across multiple games; in Grid Wars, you’re always starting from scratch, and there’s no plethora of weapons to choose from. But I also find that I’m just starting to have fun in any individual room in Robokill right before I’ve killed the last enemy. Grid Wars, with its endless levels of increasing numbers of enemies, means that the hectic screen-clearing fun never stops until your skills are no longer able to keep up. I wish there was some combination of the two. That would be a game I might never stop playing, to the detriment of this blog.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 28th, 2008 at 9:39 pm by Cyde Weys and is filed under Musings. Keywords: . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.