208.7 hours played
Written 21 days ago
This game rules. After 200 hours and 100% achievments i do see its flaws, but if youre just here for a good time, youll find it, so lets start with good stuff. Note that i have not really engaged with co-op outside of the demo with one friend for a few runs before buying the game and some laggy public online co-op for Museum completion right before the multiplayer items were made to be available in singleplayer.
The gunplay and moment to moment gameplay is golden. Its fun to move around with tons of options and movement optimisation isn't too hard to achieve but its a nice learning curve to work on if you're into it (my favorite is trying to keep my momentum after using a yellow boost pad). The guns are really fun to use and you might find some you like less, but you're offered enough weapons in a run and lategame options to avoid them if you want to. The fast paced action of the regular fights is very well paced with harder arenas, optional parkour challenges for extra rewards, and time for reflection during shopping pit stops. In the early-mid game theres a really fun part of finding secrets, sidequests, and locked paths and figuring out how to solve them, slowly revealing the layers of the game. This process of being better is also tested with knowledge that can help you find alternate solutions to the parkour challenges and remembering what abilities and items the game has to offer so you can ready your build in advance. The direct meta-progression is also satisfying with more options and power being slowly granted to your player and a well-suited reward for unlocking every upgrade: GAMBLING!
(Oo boy, i went a bit too hard on this one. This part can be skipped since most of these flaws appear in late-endgame. TL;DR the roguelike aspect game unfortunately lacks depth once all options are available to you)
I did say however that i had gripes with this game, and it is unfortunately that i find it somewhat shallow, especially in endgame. While the meta-upgrades feel good, they greatly increase the number of options you have in a run and a lot of them cannot be turned off. This makes it extremely easy to just have a good run since you are offered so many weapons, perk choices with rerolls, and so many opportunities for items. At some point i resorted to using dice to spice up my first choices since it was easy to just get the big damage boosting abilities, getting a good gun, and blasting enemies by just having big numbers. Speaking of which, I feel like the majority of perks are simply dps buffs with conditions and those who stray away from this become kind of gimmicky and unreliable as a main strategy, with most of the defensive perks being a waste of 1/4 of your perks in my opinion. Plus, the math of the game discourages you from specializing in one type of buff, since DPS = DMG * CRIT * FIRERATE, so a +15% to damage wont be as meaningful as a +15% to firerate if you already have +80% damage and +0% firerate. The same story happens for the items, which are even more conditional on what other stuff you have (potentially being useless if you dont deal a certain type of damage for example), but on another hand theres no reason to try to get something like Bowl + Popcorn + Toaster for an easy but huge damage buff for example (not that its not satisfying, but you start to just look for powerful item combos like this and ignore ones you dont like as much). For the gameplay itself, while the player controls are top notch, the environments are lacking. You'll find the same 12-ish same reused layouts per stage and the parkour challenges that once felt cool to cheese now feel boring when you just use your overpowered movement to skip it altogether. And once you're back into a fight, its kind of just going through the motions of jumping all over the arena shooting your guns and using abilities until every enemy is dead and then going to the next zone in a straight line unless you reach a secret / parkour challenge until you reach the door to the next level or boss. The better stages are those that modify this formula (like [spoiler]the city[/spoiler]) or lean into it (like [spoiler]the moon[/spoiler]) but the problem with these are that they only appear towards the end of a run and are required. By that i mean, Roboquest allows you to take different paths for different stages and rewards, but after you've unlocked everything, you kind of don't have a reason to deviate from the path or two you prefer, which you have complete control over where you go and the paths intersect a lot, with 3 stages being unavoidable as all paths pass through them (previously 4, but and update added an alternative option for one of those stages at the cost of executing a challenge during your run). Even then, if you decide to go through a different path, you wont find the stages to be that much different, as roughly the same enemies appear at the same time in a run and you wont probably wont notice the difference in the layouts of every stage as you can just complete them by going in circles while staying airborne as much as possible, again using your overpowered movement, to interact as less as possible with the ground because staying down there means getting shot from more angles and possibly getting stuck on geometry or falling victim to traps. The lack of interaction from the player with the actual stage also limits what the devs can put in a stage, with the most impactful one that doesn't take over the gameplay (like the time limits) being the lone [spoiler]Fusion Core[/spoiler] which actually restricts your vertical movement for once. The problem with needing to avoid the level is amplified in harder difficulty where mistakes are obviously punished more harshly, but ive personally grown to be able to get consistent pretty consistent S-ranks at the highest difficulty, just i often have to hope the final boss doesn't use their hardest attack to dodge ([spoiler]that laser bar barrage is something, but at least it's doable, just you have to focus on it while she's doing it[/spoiler]).
Now, that sure is a long paragraph for a game I said ruled, but obviously when you play a game for 200h you become accustomed to its flaws. My personal thoughts on this game is that it is the most "Good" game i've played. Good gameplay, good art, fun simple story, good music (ik some people really love the soundtrack, but i personally just like listening to it sometimes, not enough to put it in my playlist). All Good. Nothing more and nothing less than a perfect 8/10. Roboquest is a game i love to play while watching a long video on side and i dont really have anything else to do. For me, once I passed through the one-time stuff it had to offer, it became like a good local fast food place, better than just McDonald's but you're not looking for anything more than a greasy and filling burger or poutine (Quebec represent). The devs have recently moved on from this game, but i think i agree with their decision. The only way to lessen the flaws of this game i could personally see would be to bloat it with more perks, guns, and items, but this wouldn't be right. I'm excited to know what the team is working on as I'm sure the team can easily make a new product that learns from Roboquest's faults, or something completely new because people should do what they want to do. Again, the experience i described here is purely singleplayer as i have not been able to bring any of my friends in my "silly doomguy robot with bunny ears" obsession, so you might be able to find more replayabilty than i could in that area.
All in all, if you're looking for a fast-paced action game with near perfect gunplay Roboquest is a well worth purchase, even if replayability may become a very noticeable issue in the endgame (like that's still at least 50 solid hours before it gets shallow). Even then, i will inevitably put many more hours into this game.
