Shoot many robots, does exactly what it says on the tin pretty much. Your main objective in this arcade title is to simply shoot the living hell out of a mass of robots. It may sound boring and generic but trust me; it gets pretty fun after a while.
So let’s start with the story, it’s the basic and rather stereotypical tale of a lonely redneck, P. Walter Tugnut (the P stands for Pickles, but don’t call him that,) that has his entire life based in his trailer, and his life consists mainly of beer and a ton of guns. Then the robots came and took all that from him, now it is your job to aid our protagonist in a journey to get back his beloved trailer and also destroy them robots in the process.
The graphics in SMR are pretty woeful and you will find yourself a little shocked to find that a game in this day and age can look like a PS2 title on a next gen console. The game designers went for a classic approach to the graphics giving SMR a slightly B-Movie style and mixing in the cell shading approach that made Borderlands as popular as it is now and then blending it with the frantic side scrolling action of the arcade classic Metal Slug.
But it may sound like I’m bashing the graphics but that only happens during the first cut scene on the menu page where you character stands on a robot and to start the game you have to…wait for it…Shoot him!
At this point the character looks slightly deformed in my opinion and didn’t give the game a good first impression. But when you jump into the actual game you will be pleasantly surprised, the graphics even out and the game starts to look a bit more appealing.
The actual game play on the other hand is fluid and very easy to pick up on, it’s one of those games that the controls take a second to learn but a lifetime to master and you it won’t be long until you will find yourself stuck in situations where the screen just gets over run by a mass of clinkering clattering caliginous junk!
Anybody get that reference….no…….anybody!?
You can find yourself frantically spinning your thumb-sticks about trying to control your character and make him aim at all the different styles of robots attacking you, and there is quite a bunch to watch out for. The standard bot is a small piece of metal on wheels brandishing a huge chainsaw, these guys can get annoying at times but thankfully a well placed rocket can take out the majority of them in one simple blow.
Then you get into the bigger badder bots, these can range from being gigantic dinosaur like robots that spew oil and fire to large armoured bases that are dropped in from flying gasbags, kind of similar to those in Gears of War 3!
Shoot Many Robots also includes in game purchases so you can beef up your arsenal to ridiculous levels with the aid of nuts and bolts that can be purchased of the XBLA or SEN/PSN. Unfortunately given the time that this review was written the purchases have not been activated so we were unable to bulk up our hillbilly friend as much as we would have liked. But just through playing the game you can build up a rack of currency to spend on a vast array of items and weapons. And from what we’ve seen there is plenty of things for you to buy and thus insures that your character will be unique to your play style. Which is always a nice thing!
The game will support full 4 player online co-op but, once again, this feature was inactive at the time of reviewing and sadly we didn’t get a chance to test it out but given what we have seen with the single player campaign the addition of 3 extra players would be really good hysterical fun for everybody…except the robots of course!
Shoot Many Robots is a challenging and enjoyable game that will have even the most experienced gamers struggling to reach the end of some levels, and it’s always nice to see and arcade game with such addictive game play is a breath of fresh air! Shoot Many Robots will be available to download on March 14th on the XBLA, PC, and the SEN/PSN for the low price of 800MP on XBLA or €9.99 on PSN/SEN.
Adam.
Akroview 