Review: A Robot Named Fight

A Robot Named Fight is a, to the best of my knowledge, one of if not the first Rogue Lite Metroid Vania game. It shows the remarkable things possible with the idea of Rogue Lite being applied to other genres and while not perfect it is pretty impressive.


Yeh I'm adding an into to reviews now so I can have a little sample in the side section.

Name: A Robot Named Fight

Price: 

£10.29 / $12.99 on Steam 

£9.99 / $12.99 on Nintendo Switch 

Reviewed on: PC (on Laptop 1)

Review: 

So a Metroid-vania game with procedural generation that's a rogue lite game where you unlock different abilities and power ups you can find in future runs. I'm still shocked the game pulls it off so well such that it rarely feels like the game is just screwing you over or requiring too much back tracking. Also there is a sort of respawn system to give you extra chances in a single run rather than it being 1 death and you're done, though you will have to find the chambers to respawn in and there's only about 2 per map generation. 

Before I start on the praise however I feel like I need to address what I see as the issues first.

A minor issue for me is that your character of A Robot Named Fight just doesn't feel as detailed as the Cronenberg horrors you have to fight. Admittedly this is likely due to the different suits you can get being more detailed and additional things like certain add ons changing your look. It's a minor niggle but I felt worth mentioning.

The sound design is a bit of a sore point for me. I feel like the aim was to go for a retro sort of synthesised sound feel but it feels like it was overdone. The voice in the into sound too distorted and sounds often feel a little almost washed out or lacking in any real depth to a degree far beyond what would be found in most older games. The sound effects almost feel like the kind of stock sound effect you'd hear in very low budget horror movies because they got a load of them cheap. Admittedly it fits in a bit with the theme of fighting these over the top horrors but it did feel like point where it lacked.

Another issue is while you can turn off flashing lights (I'm simply not a fan of them most of the time) even with the options switched on you can still have flashing lights occur if you're wearing the bright shell and get hit multiple times in quick succession as each hit causes a sort of pulse to be emitted. So yeh turning off Flashing lights only disables the environmental flashing lights not all flashing as such.

The game also suffers from an issue a number of Rogue Lite games have where you can just have a bad run. The game can spawn lots of movement speed upgrades and few damage or life upgrades early on meaning you can face a seriously difficult early game or just be screwed over by RNG.

Adding to the previous issue is pick up locations aren't always that obvious and require you to break blocks to find some of the upgrades which can lead to some frustration as you spend time shooting almost every single block in an area to find the one that will break to reveal the upgrade. Sometimes this is obvious such as one brick out of play or a part of the level texture that looks like it's cracked or stands out but other times it can just seem the same as regular parts of the wall. It almost feels like this issue is known about as there are power ups you can get that detect where the power ups are hidden and these are very useful.

I would also argue there is a bit of an issue with the difficulty curve, as for me I could judge if I had a shot at a run by the time I got to the second boss. After the first boss and moving into the 2nd area the game seems to become considerably more difficult with enemies taking far more shots to kill. However if I was able to get to and beat the 2nd boss then there was little step up in difficulty to the 3rd area and by collecting upgrades you can often find the 3rd area and the boss of the 3rd area far easier to beat. In fact beating the 2nd area boss for me generally meant I was going to have a successful run at reaching the games end boss.

There are some issues in my view with the controls feeling a little stiff. This also isn't helped by a camera that moves with you quite easily thus sometimes when you jump the camera will move up so you can no longer see the platform you were trying to jump to or land on.

The game also has a few sort of blind drops and while you can crouch to make the camera look down, sometimes the platform will still be out of view.

On one single occasion I had the game spawn a pit with 1 exit requiring a power up I hadn't got to escape and the alternative requiring you to take damage going across a set of spikes, if I hadn't got one of the last power ups in the run I'd have had to tank a lot of damage across the pit instead I could get out a 3rd way. The issue was the pit was in an area before you got the last power up and it was lucky mostly that meant I didn't fall in said pit.

Ok that's enough of me complaining time to say why this game is just so well done and if none of those issues had you nope out then you might be interested in what the game does well.

The game really does give you a ton of rewards and is really well paced to incentivise repeated playthroughs. I've seen some powers on 1 run and not seen them again in 15 hours of playing the game that's how many weapons and abilities the game has. Often the game has multiple abilities or weapons with the same function to bypass the same kind of things but with subtle differences. As an example you might get a flamethrower that uses your energy reserves to power it or just have your basic shot enhanced with flame to burn blockages away on certain doors. 

The game has a surprising variety of bosses witch each run presenting you a one of a number of possible bosses for each area. Each boss very much feeling unique, with some that spawn ads, some with multiple stages and some that count almost and two distinct boss entities acting as one. I think in over 20 hours there's still some bosses I've not run into.

Once you've beaten each of the bosses in the first two areas over multiple playthroughs one of the recent updates added new environments. So once you've beaten all the possible bosses you end up with a whole new tile set that can show up complete with new enemies and bosses to learn and contend with. This helps make the game feel fresh as you're no longer just going through the exact same environments against the exact same enemies each run.

Another thing that is spawned in randomly are variants of the normal enemies. The variants I've seen so far include: Grey tougher variants of enemies that sometimes drop upgrades when killed or lots of scrap (the in game currency to buy from allies); cloaked variants that you can only just see; toxic variants that when killed create a toxic cloud; regenerating variants that when killed will reform after a short period of time. Oh and this is in addition to the elite forms of some of the enemies too.

It's also worth pointing out the game is designed to be beaten multiple times with the 3rd fight again the Meat Beast "final" boss leading to a different sequence and further final boss. On top of all that for the true hardcore players is an area and boss I've not got to yet in the form of the glitch realms which are somewhat random to discover or be teleported to but give additional story and challenge for the player but the more time you've completed the game the more likely you are to be able to access the area and bosses.

It's also worth pointing out the developer has a Patreon which is funding the development of new content for the game that will be free to everyone that owns the game so that's actually pretty cool I think as it's already a pretty substantial game and the developer is basically using money from those who wish to give it to keep making the game even bigger and better for everyone rather than (as many indie developers have to) moving on the pump out a new title to generate a whole new lot of sales to keep going.

Verdict:

A game that's a little rough round the edges in places but still manages to produce a story with some surprises and quite compelling gameplay almost creating a new genre / subgenre in gaming or at least setting a high bar for said subgenre. Very much worth your time if you're into Metroidvania titles and the local split screen vs might add more value for some too. However it doesn't quite get a recommendation from me for everyone as some must play must see great. It's good, but those rough edge really do feel like they mean the game isn't a must play for people who aren't that big into the Metroidvania genre. It really does feel like it only just misses the recommendation though.

Composite Score:

Overall score:

I can only assume this was one cool Grandmother the developer had who was into Cronenberg esc horror films and stuff.