Robobquest is an Early Access roguelite FPS from French studio RyseUp Studios. If I had to describe Roboquest in one sentence. I’d say “imagine if Doom and Borderlands had a baby”. Thankfully, we can say a little more than that for this preview.
Developed by RyseUp Studios, a small team of 22. They’ve released two VR games on Steam this year already. The Burning Descent, a VR-only arena shooter. And Winter Break, a VR-only multiplayer party game. Both games unfortunately have slipped under most gamers’ radar but maybe Roboquest‘s home of regular ol’ PC monitors will give this studio a chance to reach a larger audience.
The Story
Roboquest story is standard fare for shooters. In the distant future Humans struggle to survive in a post apocalyptic earth decimated by killer robots known as Badbots. But a young girl named Max happens upon a Guardian. Who she reactivates to go on a journey for answers.
It’s simple but effective and should remind most gamers of Alyx & Dog from Half-Life 2.
Art/Style
RyseUp Studios have done wonders with a simple cel-shading graphical styling. It’s clean with neat, well thought out detailing on characters and terrain. If you remember XIII, a cel-shaded game from the early 2000’s. You might remember seeing sounds rendered alongside your gun, “boom” “click” “clack”. It never once got in the way of action and always gave me a smile, feeling as though for one frame I’m in a comic book!
The cutscenes between levels and after defeating bosses are done as minimally animated and voiced comic book pages. It would be nice to see these fleshed out with some more voice acting or sound effects to add emphasis to each panel as they appear.
Mobility
For a game in this genre, movement is crucial. I mentioned earlier that Roboquest shares some of Dooms’ DNA. Throughout my playthroughs it’s obvious that the developers are going for a 3D bullet hell, where rotating around the arena is promoted through ledges, lanes and pillars.
Movement in its current form of walk, sprint, double jump is fluid and enjoyable. But I feel the map design lends itself to a vault mechanic. It would encourage creativity in movement. Opening up the possibility for a higher skill ceiling through increased AI placement for the harder difficulties.
Weapons
Besides cel-shaded styling, Roboquest also takes some inspiration from Borderlands’ wide, wacky range of weapons and character selection. Boasting 40 weapons to choose from. These are broken down into four categories of weapons. Assault, Demolition, Technology and Precision. By picking up damage modifiers known as Cores and through levelling your character and receiving perks. You can spec weapons further into their categories, adding variation and chance to each playthrough.
Shooting is accurate and snappy. The weapons might need some balancing still but with ten on average per category, the variety is there. Most of Roboquest‘s arsenal promote differing playstyles; all we need are some more levels and scenarios to make them worthwhile for replayability.
Game-Loop – Character Progression
Once unlocked, players can choose from three roles to play as. Guardian, your starter role, Recon and Engineer, my current favourite. With the ability to throw out a drone to fight for you and a taser to shock close range enemies.
As you upgrade the basecamp, carryover items known as Artefacts will also become available. So far there is a backpack, jetpack, and extra life. With Dead Cells bearing a major influence over Roboquest, I’m hoping they spend a little more time with character progression and take a few pages from their script.
Enemies
Opening doors in Roboquest really reminds me of old-skool Doom. All the enemies immediately lock on and begin firing. You’ve got to act fast or you’ll be stuck at the door, peering through for an opening.
While Roboquest boasts over 20 enemies. So far it boils down to three main types of Badbot; Minions are cute little bollard cyclops. Grunts are the Guardians’ evil counterparts. Sentries are a stationary tower type. But it’s the variations in behaviour, abilities, and weaponry that makes them a joy to destroy.
Co-op Experience
Co-op is currently friends-only on Steam. Connecting to a friends game is easy and intuitive. Progress from single-player and multiplayer both crossover. Depending on how they implement a planned feature “Game+”, it might be handy to have separate save instances for both.
Our playthroughs of co-op were impressively smooth, with little to no network issues, like lag, stutter or bad hit-reg.
Both of us felt it was a little easy for two players to complete the game on Heroes+2. So far the hardest difficulty. Granted getting an A+ might take some coordination. We found that creating complementary builds is fairly easy, effectively being able to run a “Stun-Destroy” meta throughout. Which was fun, but makes me question replayability.
Conclusion
In its current state, with “5 biomes, 3 loadouts and their upgrades, 40 weapons, 20 enemies and 2 bosses.” Roboquest will provide the average player with around six hours of playtime, and for those looking to ace everything, possibly ten hours.
Given how polished what we’ve seen so far is, and considering the developers have stated this is about one third of the final game content. I’m genuinely excited to see how this develops over the next 8-10 months of early access.
Roboquest is a great example of how early access should be done. And I’d love to find some more games that took the time in private development to build such a strong base game before their early access release. If you’ve played any such game recently, please let me know down in the comments section below and hopefully I’ll cover that too.
Roboquest is currently on Steam Store for €16.79 (Sep 2020)
Review copy provided by the publisher
