As Sam McRae, last surviving member of the “Titan Hauler” crew, you must hack and blast your way through an onslaught of truly bad 'bots to find a way to prevent a potential planet-destroying catastrophe. The mystery of what happened to everyone while you were in cryostasis unfolds around you as you wade through the bodies of your fallen shipmates, unloading round after round into your relentless automaton attackers.
In Bad Bots you're a mechanic who finds himself on a spaceship that's overrun by berserk robots. The story begins promisingly: you find yourself in a compactor akin to Star Wars and have to escape there with a portable AI who aids you on the way. Story advances in static cutscenes like a comic.
The first enemy is the knife bot. Their animation is annoyingly clunky. The bots will be armed with guns soon, thankfully with a better animation, and so are you: they will shoot you from behind boxes and take cover if shot, quite cool. However, you soon realize that their damage output is appalling: a single bot effectively can't kill the player. Coupled with the fact the spaceship is full of health packs, you probably won't die unintentionally during the story campaign except maybe to the final boss (or that one death trap along the way). You can effectively charge any non-boss enemy. To amend this, the game later throws at you tens or even hundreds of melee bots, electrocuting service droids and wall-crawling critter bots.
These "waves" become easy when you start to understand the controls. Those are at times rather quirky. Jumping, you might hold on to a ledge you did not want to. Character defaults to climbing ladders, during which you cannot shoot, and you can't fall off the ladder except by jumping sideways upwards. At the top of the ladder the character might not take off the ladder at all to the direction you wanted, requiring awkward multiple tries to get it working.
There's no music except in the title screen. The game could have benefited from some eerie music, but now it's just awkward. Maybe you could put some scifi-style music on the background.
One thing that works is the spaceship interior design. The ship has everything a dreadnought is supposed to have from living quarters to storage to waste disposal, and it's used as well within the story. However the story proves to be rather stereotypic. Also, how did so weak bots ever kill anybody?
It can be quite fun but wow, it feels so unpolished and cheap and nasty.
- No music or background sound most of the time. Silence. Feels really weird.
- Some things don't have sound effects. E.g. hitting with an axe when there's nothing there.
- Enemies are so stupid and move in the derpiest way imaginable (almost as if they are in an online game and you have lag).
- Animation is somewhat primitive
- The background tears nastily when scrolling
- Can't redefine keys.