Review by Monster 2 of 2

Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto. RoboBlitz is the first official arcade game to use the Unreal 3.0 Engine, which not only proves its might graphically but also in terms of actual gameplay. The gameplay itself is entirely driven by physics, which makes for a very interesting concept. Does this game meet expectations? Is it really worth 1200 Microsoft Points? Let's see, shall we?

Story
You take up the character of Blitz, a robot taking up resident on a space station. Life is grand, that is, until space pirates show up and start wrecking the place. In order to fend off the attackers, you must activate no less than 6 different facilities on the station to destroy the source of the onslaught, a giant MegaNOED. The order in which you do these systems is not important, but these must all be finished if you hope to fire off the Space Cannon and destroy the MegaNOED controlling the invading space pirates.

In order to power up the space cannon to fire, you must go to the Ammunition Depot to build and load a projectile for the ship's railgun. From there, you move on to the Coolant Tower to start up the fans to keep the gun cooled. Next up is the Electrical System to power the massive space cannon. Without fuel from the Distribution Plant, the gun's motor won't work, so that must be the next step. Calibrating the cannon at the Radar station is also a must, since you have to have a target to fire at. Lastly, you must reach the Security Vault to obtain the firing codes, so you can finally show the invaders that this is your ship and you aren't going to give in to their attacks.

Gameplay
While there are six main objectives to be done, each of these is broken up into 3 stages. Adding on the last boss level brings the total amount of stages up to 19. The first two stages of each facility requires you to bring that respected system up to snuff, which isn't that difficult but does require a good amount of time and work. The third stage is what most would call a boss level, where a more powerful enemy shows up to try and stop you. All in all it will take the average player 6-8 hours to beat this game. Keep in mind that you have to complete the game several times in order to earn all the achievements, so that will add even more game time. If you decide to find all the upgradium, expect to add on at least another couple of hours, and that is if you don't look at a guide for help. We completed all 12 achievements in around 12 hours, although we did rush through the game to hurry this review along.

We recommend everyone play through the game on the basic difficulty before venturing on to the harder "Master Technician" difficulty just to get a grasp on how to do some of the levels, mostly the boss levels. It can get quite frustrating trying to figure out what to do at the harder difficulty, but that happens with every game. Once we figured out the basic concepts of the game, we started proceeding through the levels at a steady and acceptable speed, occasionally running into a snag that would take us a little longer to finish.

Just like many other platformers, the main concept of this game is trial and error. We can't tell you how many times we got ourselves shredded into many, many pieces trying to reach a piece of upgradium before we realized that we had to dash and jump and not just move really fast and jump. Sometimes you have to leave a level and come back to it later with upgrades in order to get some of the upgradium. We were obtaining upgradium that would have been dramatically easier to get if we had the tractor beam, but we simply wanted it right then and there. Stacking boxes and attempting a jump thirty times or one simple tractor beam later on? That is for you to decide.

Scattered around Roboblitz's world are wrenches for health, batteries for energy, and a special item called upgradium that ranges from 5 point chunks (regular levels) to 25 point chunks (boss stages). Obviously, you want to find as much of this material as you can since you can upgrade yourself to be more effective. There is 300 possible upgradium chunks in each facility, which makes the grand total 1,800 pieces.

Instead of having on-screen indicators for your current health and energy, the developers decided to implement them onto your character (they are displayed on your back). This was a great idea, since it reduces onscreen clutter and connects you with your character even more. How? With most games, your health is thrown up on one side of the screen which makes you feel as though you aren't the actual character, but just someone controlling that character. By placing the current health and energy levels on Blitz, you remove the third person perspective and focus more on just playing the game. Honestly though, we never had a problem with our energy levels being too low and we only had to check our health a couple of times during boss scenes so some players might never even look at their health. It is a cool concept, nonetheless.

Graphics
Without a doubt, these are the best graphics we have ever witnessed while playing an Xbox 360 Arcade game. Before we go any farther, note that the original graphics for this game took up nearly 500 MB, which went way over the limit set by Microsoft. If you don't know about that limit, there is a rule that was set in stone that stated that all Xbox Live Arcade games had to be under 50 MB, which coincides with the current size of memory cards. Rather than completly destroying the graphical beauty they created, Naked Sky Entertainment looked into developing technologies until one hit the bullseye - procedural texturing. Using this method, they were able to shrink their textures down dramatically (90%), ensuring their spot on the Xbox Live Marketplace. Alongside with the Unreal Engine, the potential is great.

Sound
The gears sound like gears, the servos sound like servos, and the lasers sound like lasers. When Blitz slams into a piece of the environment too hard a la the Tractor Beam, a sickening (yet enjoyable) clank takes place. Everything sounds the way it should. There were no delays and everything seemed to be spot on. We never remember thinking "What the heck was that?" when we heard any sounds, so we would say they did a pretty decent job with the sound effect implementation. The robot beeps tend to get annoying after hearing them from the start of the game. However, you only have to put up with them during conversations and occasionally when Blitz takes damage, so it isn't that bad.

The music has a nice techno beat to it and has gradual increases and decreases in tempo according to what is taking place in game. Boss scenes have more hectic sounding music while the normal stages range from smooth, quieter tracks to tracks that scream "Hurry and get the Space Cannon done." We can't complain about the musical score and we are pleasantly satisfied with it.

Controls
You get all the standard movements in RoboBlitz, such as jumping and dashing. Once you start to earn upgrades, you will be able to start doing a number of cool maneuvers. You will be able to move faster, which helps speed up some of the more repetitive actions required in a few of the stages. Also, you will eventually be able to jump much farther which will help you reach some of the harder-to-grab upgradium, which in turn, helps you buy even more upgrades. In order to make life easier, we suggest buying at least the first jump upgrade before anything else. The performance upgrade wouldn't hurt, either.

The controls are quite responsive, which we always expect from any game, although we did encounter a few issues of controlling Blitz. For one, we had a couple of ramp climbing issues where we simply could not get all the way up a ramp without backing all the way down and getting a running start. These ramps were quite steep, but we knew we should have been able to climb them without err. Another problem we had was working with one of the most important features of the game, dashing. It took us a greater part of the game to finally get a grasp on it, but once we did it was smooth sailing. For everyone wondering what the trick is, simply move the joystick in the direction you want to dash and click it in at the same time. You'll be flying around the space station in no time.

We ran into a problem with the physics in the game being too good, with Blitz randomly getting caught on pieces of the environment as if we were trying to lift the entire space station with his tiny robot arms. Occasionally, we would get stuck going up ramps (once again) while carrying objects because we didn't "lift" it high enough and it would catch on the ground. We soon learned to use this "glitch" to our advantage by purposely attempting jumps that we knew we couldn't make, but just trying to catch our arms on the edge of the platform since we knew looking up and down also causes your arms to move up and down. Once we were stuck on the edge of a platform with our arms out straight we would quickly jerk the camera down (thrusting our arms downward) and jump, effectively "throwing" ourselves up further then normal. It looks sort of honky, but it worked out for us. However, we can't really knock the physics since they are technically sound and they are merely acting out how there real-world counterparts would behave.

Weapons & Upgrades
There are 7 different weapons in RoboBlitz, ranging from special weapons to downright destructive ones. You can upgrade yourself with each of these weapons by venturing down to the lab and purchasing them with your hard-earned upgradium. Is it our fault that we tested every single weapon we got on Karl? He comments on each one uniquely, so we didn't feel too bad about doing it. None of the weapons are actually required to beat the game except the EMP rifle, which you get at the beginning anyway. The weapons will make the game smoother if you do choose to purchase them. Even though there are only six actual weapons, we consider Blitz himself a weapon since not only can be pick enemies up and twirl them around, but he can also slam them into the ground repeatedly which we openly admit having several fits of laughter doing.

Multiplayer
While there is currently no multiplayer in RoboBlitz, there are plans to release a FREE (yes, 0 Microsoft Points) multiplayer expansion at one point. This is yet another reason to purchase this game, because if it is anything like the single player portion, we will be playing it like crazy.

The Achievements
You will have to play this game at least twice in order to earn every single achievement. Most likely it will take more than that to earn every single one of them. For instance, it is impossible to receive the "Spartan Blitz" achievement in the same game as five of the upgrade achievements, since you must finish the game without using any upgrades to get it. If you decided to play through the game on the basic setting "technician" you automatically cannot receive either Spartan Blitz or Victory Blitz, since those can only be earned on the "Master Technician" difficulty. In all, there are the standard 12 achievements worth 200 points for RoboBlitz. We decided to play through the game on the easy setting our first time around and we received the majority of the achievements then. Afterwards, we played through the game on the hard setting and we buzzed right through it without buy a single upgrade, since we knew how to do all the puzzles. That took us around 2½ hours. For the full list, please visit our RoboBlitz Achievement page.

Overall the achievements are not too hard, but they will require some legwork by the player, especially the Upgradium Blitz achievement which requires the player to find every single piece of upgradium. As much as we love achievements, we hope the purchasers of this game choose to enjoy at least their first run through the game and not worry so much about earning as many achievements as possible.

Final Score
A 1200 Point price tag might make a few weary about purchasing this platformer, but RoboBlitz is completely worth it. The biggest reason for the $15 value is that the Unreal 3.0 Engine does not come cheap. It costs a pretty penny to license it and this game simply wouldn't have been that great if it would have went in any other direction. There are many hours of gameplay within the world of RoboBlitz and we can imagine that there will be a large amount of gamers replaying the 18 stages of play in order to increase there total score, inching there way up on the leaderboard. We managed to snag a score that was a few million shy of a billion points. We fully recommended this instant hit and cannot wait for the multiplayer expansion. Bring it on!


Note: A rating scale of 0 - 10 is used, with 10 being the highest a game can score while 0 is the absolute worst. Each category has a point value associated with it and a final score is displayed at the end of the review. The opinions expressed in this review are not necessarily the opinions held by the owners of www.achieve360points.com.