Bubble Bobble is one of my favorite games on the NES, so I was super hyped to dive into Robbotto, a game that’s clearly inspired by it. Robbotto is a clever combination of Robb and Otto, the two main characters, who are robots aboard a spaceship that’s malfunctioning. As with most games, the best way to fix things is with semi-violent combat! Your job on each level is to zap each enemy and then hose it with water to put it out of commission. To make things even tougher, your zapper and water don’t reach very far and enemies don’t stay zapped for long. The high voltage doesn’t completely freeze them in their tracks either, so it’s often not easy to hose em down and finish them off. The game is made up of 100 levels with a boss on every 10th level, and the boss levels quickly get immensely hard. There’s a fair amount of variance in the enemies, especially once they can shoot and jump, and the super awful robots that can actually fix other broken-down bots are straight out of a nightmare!
On paper the game sounds terrific, especially with the Bubble Bobble nostalgia. Sadly, the game is more painful than fun. In a nod to Bubble Bobble there’s a bit of floatiness to your movement, which means it’s quite challenging to get out of the way of enemies or their projectiles. You get three lives, and if you run out you can always continue (unless you’re playing on one of the harder difficulties that limits your number of continues) at your most recent level with the enemies reset, but I can’t count how many times I had to play it overly safe just so that I wouldn’t die in annoying ways. The game also lacks many of the things that made Bubble Bobble fun: you don’t have power-ups or items to collect and your water and zapping don’t have any extra uses like the bubbles that Bub and Bob use to defeat enemies. The art is similar: I felt like I was really missing out on the extra little fun bits and silliness that Bubble Bobble had, even if that’s more thematically proper here.
All of these little issues compound together during the boss battles. They’re creative enough, in fact the developers should be applauded a bit for their level design given the limited things the player can do, and that’s especially true with the boss battles. With that said, good grief are boss battles infuriating! As I said before, to take an enemy out you have to zap them and then hose them down with water enough to knock them out while they’re zapped. With boss battles, the thing you have to zap is typically moving around a lot or in a place where you’ll die if you stick around too long, so zapping it and then hosing it down for any period of time is incredibly risky. If you zap a boss’s weak spot and then move to dodge a projectile, you’ll likely miss out on all the damage you could’ve potentially done and you’ll have to zap it again. This means you have to be a bit risky if you don’t want the battle to last forever, and if you’re a bit too risky and die three times you get to start the whole thing over again. I only made it to level 50, where I battled against the snake boss in the image below and wiped at least a dozen times while making almost no progress at all before giving up. It’s a cool fight in concept with it dripping poisonous projectiles from its teeth and swiping at you with a sharp tail, but the tail is almost unavoidable since jumping and falling is so slow and it always wants to attack when the snake spits its weak point down.
The game also has a two player mode in which you share lives, but you also split your abilities. Instead of each player being able to zap enemies and then hose them down, one can only zap and the other can only hose enemies down. This means that even though you begin in different places on a level you have to work together quickly to take enemies out. You can go into the options and turn off “true co-op”, but this disables co-op achievements. I didn’t really get to mess with this mode much but even with the limited abilities I can see it adding to the fun, having to work together as two specialist robots to take down enemies instead of two people “working together individually”. But even this has a negative to it: you can only have one save at any given time! If you’re on level 75 in single player and want to play with a friend, you’ll have to start a new two player game which will erase your other save! On the other hand, if you don’t often get to play with a friend and want to play solo you’ll have to have a separate profile or you’ll lose all your two player progress to be able to play solo!
I miss Bubble Bobble, even though I have no doubt that it’ll be less fun to play again without looking at it through nostalgia glasses, but this game just made me miss it even more. When it came down to it, I just didn’t enjoy my time with Robbotto.
Robbotto is available for Nintendo Switch (reviewed) and Steam (Windows)
I received a free copy of this game in exchange for an honest review.