After the complete clusterfuck of
mistakes that HP made with the Touchpad, I got one at 99 dollars,
which makes it one of the mospoverty tablets on the market. Sure,
at that price point it is quite nice, and it does the standard
smartphone/tablet stuff well, but this is a site about games, and in
that department it is predictably lacking. Outside of Angry
Birds, which comes pre-installed, there just isn't much
available. One game that is available, and thankfully free, is
Robotek HD by Hexage, a company that makes games for every
major and minor OS.
I should point out right away that I
generally don't like games for mobile platforms, not because they
require touch as the only form of input, but because developers
generally don't make games that make this input method work. If a
game uses a virtual thumbstick, I'm out. There is also the opposite
problem of going to far in the other direction and make a game so
simple that it requires no skill to play, and that is the type of
game that Robotek is.
Basically the game is a series of
battles between the player's robots and the enemy's. There is a main
robot for each side, and when that robot dies the battle is lost.
The player has three options during combat turn-based. There is a
set of three offensive skills, three defensive skills, and three
types of robots that can be summoned. The entire game is based on a
slot machine-like system. The three skills of the selected type are
scroll past, and all the player gets to do is stop them. The first
one scrolls slow enough so that the player is able to choose one of
the three, but the other two go much faster and stop automatically
after that and are effectively random.
For robots, there is a big one that
doesn't do much damage but takes a lot of hits, a support one that
does a lot low damage hits, and a strong one that shoots lasers. For
offense, there is an area-of-effect attack, a stun attack, and an
extremely strong laser attack. For defense, there is a shield, an
ability that raises the players robots' attack while lowering the
enemies', and hacking, which has a chance of bringing an enemy robot
to the player's side. The way the slot works is that if one skill or
robot shows up more than once, then that skill or robot will be more
powerful. If three of the same thing shows up, the user gets a super
powerful skill or robot, and for some reason an extra spin on the
wheel. Basically, getting a triple completely changes the course of
a battle.
My main complaint about the game is
that this system makes the flow of combat feel completely out of the
player's control, and that is the opposite of what makes a game fun.
The choices left to the player seem very small, with the strategy of
choosing between offense, defense, and robots being left mainly up to
what the situation on the play field is. If the player doesn't have
robots, summon them. No shield? Use defense. Got both? Use
offense. Frankly, the game could play itself and it wouldn't be any
different, as the matter of whether the player wins or not is left up
to random luck.
On the positive side the presentation
of the game is alright. The graphics are what I would expect from a
high end flash game and the music is decent. It's sort of generic
electronic stuff, but at least it isn't offensively bad or annoying.
At the very least it is nice to see a “freemium” game that is
upfront about how it works. Essentially, a message comes up at the
beginning of the game that tells the player that it is completely
possible to beat the game without buying stuff, but if the player
wants to support the developer, he or she can purchase some stuff
that gives the robots buffs or something like that, and most
importantly, there aren't a bunch of ads all over the screen like in
many android games. I didn't really like the game all that much, but
I can respect that. The developers must have done something right,
because even though I didn't care for Robotek HD, I still
spent over an hour spaced out in front of it.
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