What happens if you smash together base building, tower defence, twin stick shooting, and real time strategy? You’ll get something akin to Saikyo Robots! This wild mash-up of ideas borrows largely from the RTS world, but attempts to make battles feel more like frantic arcade arena shooter battles. When you are spinning lots of plates in game design, it can be tricky to keep them all spinning. What follows is an interesting, but quite lopsided game with lots of ideas and some confusion thrown into the mix.
Upon choosing your character, you’ll take command of a giant robot with guns! It also has a sphere of influence to awaken other slumbering robots nearby, and these robots fall into melee or ranged attackers. Like many RTS games, you can command your mini army at will, and after the tutorial level, which is a full-on arena shooter for some reason, you’ll want your army to do one of several things. You can have them attack enemy robots, defend you against the enemies, guard your base castle from being attacked at night by enemies trying to smash your energy core inside it, or mine and collect resources to take them back to your castle to upgrade it.
Saikyo Robots works in day/night game cycles. Mining is probably the most important task during the day, as resources let you upgrade your castle. This can mean you’ll have cannons at each corner, or you can upgrade product factories that allow you to have bigger, better armies of minion robots. The factories require resources to keep churning out new robots for you to command, so mining is always required. During the day, you’ll be scouting around levels trying to make your way to an exit. These levels are angular blocks of abstract dungeon corridors and aesthetically do little to impress. The same can be said about their layout. Frequent, pointless dead ends, and large areas you’d never need to explore are included, with little or no actual incentive to explore them. It feels like levels are trying to be like mazes, but they aren’t complex enough to pull off any puzzle elements either.
Instead, you’ll be allocating works to build bridges to cross over to blocked off level sections, often to then trigger with a sacrificial portal to get an upgrade, or to trigger something else that will advance the game. Most levels devolve into either survive X nights or reach the exit in X nights. When nighttime hits, you’ll want to be back at base, as each night brings a larger horde of enemies to battle against. They will pile up against the four castle doors, battering them until they break, before invading your castle and battering your core. If they get that, it’s game over, and because your minions are incredibly stupid when it comes to battle, you’ll need to pick up the slack and defend for your life. Thankfully, one of Saiko Robots’ strengths is that the twin stick shooting feels responsive and predictable. It’s just you’ll need to move quickly to prevent overwhelm and death.
Battles in particular showcase a lot of my user experience issues with Saikyo Robots. When trying to command your army, there is very little indication that they’ve acknowledged and are performing the commands you’ve given them. Are they mining? Fighting? Just standing there? Who knows. Often I thought I had control of robots, only to realise I hadn’t because the total robots under my command didn’t match what I thought had been captured in my initial call out. Add this to their lemming-like approach to survival, and sometimes you wonder what importance the army has in big battles at all. My gameplay was a mixture of frustration that things were clunky, and then jubilation that I’d overcome the odds largely on my own.
There are moments where it all comes together. They don’t happen nearly often enough, but when they do, commanding your units, shooting down waves of enemies, and upgrading your castle turrets whilst trying to survive the night becomes a frantic juggling act. I wish the RNG nature of enemy deployment, upgrades, and AI brain power allowed this to happen more often.
Uneven, but with moments of greatness popping out between moments of frustration, I’ve given this an intriguing 7 out of 10. I think it is because commanding armies and watching chaos unfold always has an element of satisfaction to it. I also feel like this is a balance patch away from being far more consistently good over multiple runs and character loadouts. We will see in time.
Review copy provided by the developer. Saikyo Robots is out on PC.
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