Robots (PS2)

The 2005 animated film Robots was a rather typical film of its time. The Blue Sky Studios production utilized a celebrity voice cast and 3D models to tell a story of a world designed for its nonhuman inhabitants who were still human in how they behaved, and perhaps unsurprisingly Robots didn’t leave a big impression despite applying a bit of creativity to its premise of a robotic city based around encouraging invention. The tie-in video games produced for home consoles were unfortunately just as boilerplate as the film in that it followed the licensed game trend of the time of making a short 3D platformer without many stand out mechanics, but it too at least showed it could try and draw a bit more out of its material even though it might not have lead to broad success.

 

Robots for PlayStation 2 follows the events of the movie to some degree, some major inclusions and removals obvious if you are familiar with the film’s plot. It does begin with our hero Rodney Copperbottom as a kid for the opening action segments before the machine boy is literally upgraded into an adult. His trip to Robot City to get recognized as inventor still goes awry as in the film as his idol, the optimistic industrialist Big Weld, hasn’t been seen in ages and a more ruthless businessman has assumed control of the company’s operations, but Rodney’s growing friendship with some rusty robots almost just feels like it suddenly exists in the plot rather than being truly introduced and the game even writes out one of the film’s villains despite their appearance in a load screen. You get the broad strokes about Rodney wanting to prove himself as inventor, find out what happened to Big Weld, and uncover a plot involving planned obsolescence of the technological citizenry, but the omissions for those familiar with the film certainly seem a little odd since they could even just be briefly brushed upon in the frequent narration by way of Rodney’s father reflecting on his son’s adventure.

 

That adventure actually seems mundane and harmless in its plainness when the adventure begins. Rodney has a few skills that help him leap around the platforming areas, the game starting you with simple stuff like a slide maneuver that barely sees use but eventually granting you items to open up some mild puzzle-solving opportunities. Rodney is accompanied by a little flying partner called the Wonderbot whose main purpose proves to be flying into electrical fields to short circuit them, you get a device known as the Magnabeam that lets you move a few metallic crates around to occasionally help with platforming, and some tools like the Scramblers and Electro Shot that so rarely see puzzle use that Rodney makes sure to remind you of their function when it’s time to use them again. They do technically have some potential when it comes to the combat, but when it comes to your tool set it’s a serviceable one but the game’s area design sadly doesn’t make the most of it.

One reason the game fails to truly challenge your abilities is the area design. Most spaces in Robots are either going to be lightly open areas that perhaps try to look too much like real locations despite needing to host platforming missions or are forward moving areas where you move from one room of obstacles and enemies to another. Neither of these would be bad if it wasn’t for how the game populates these areas or tries to squeeze some weak concepts out of them. In the more open spaces you’ll often be given some task like collecting a group of blueprints for your next weapon, the player needing to scrounge around large open spaces that don’t really ask too much out of you except time and thoroughness. Sometimes there might be a little bit of platforming to overcome or a character will ask you to perform a task for them, but unfortunately, a lot of the tasks these characters ask you to do turn out to be collecting more objects in that same area. So, as you retread ground to collect objects in order to collect more objects without any meaningful challenges obstructing you, these segments end up feeling like busywork since it’s just a matter of looking in the right place rather than figuring anything out or testing your skills.

 

The more action-oriented forward-moving levels do fare better and have more imagination poured into them, but they’re not without their limitations and flawed ideas. One persistent problem that becomes worse during these segments is the game’s camera. When you enter interior areas it becomes unwieldy as it resists your influence due to nearby walls or fails to adjust as you need to start hopping in different directions multiple times in a row. Wrangling the camera becomes an unfortunate part of the experience even though it’s not always too belligerent, but Robots does seem to have an unusually high amount of slowly moving platforms where you’re left to do nothing but watch until that one moment you can hop on and you’ll need to often do this multiple times in a row. Many of these are more a test of patience than anything else such as the long rotating platforms in molten slag and even if they are made to be a challenge, that just makes failure more irritating if its arises. Near the end of the game there is a long vertical chamber where you need to hop onto sluggishly spinning fan blades, then pop off to ride an air current up to the next layer, and then get off with the right amount of lead in to drop properly onto the incoming blade to repeat the process. Keeping the camera on your side complicates this too so it definitely feels like a meeting point of the platforming hindering bugbears that crop up usually in small amounts elsewhere, but even though this moment can be hard it’s not because it’s requiring skill so much as performing the right action before you need to wait an absurd amount of time to try again.

 

There are a few decent puzzles scattered around the journey and once you get abilities like a glide to perform after your jump you can start to move around areas that not only can push a little harder but are more open to you finding your own means of speeding up progress, but when you get into a battle you’ll find that most of them are just wrench swinging affairs. There are many different types of enemy robots, but whether they like to get in close, fly around, or attack from range, you are often able to easily close in and smack them until they’re out of the picture. It’s a very basic but effective way of clearing away danger that invalidates any threat most of them could pose, but the funny thing is Robots thinks its enemies are more dangerous than they are. Earlier mentioned options like the Scrambler can be used in combat to do things like disable foes or deal long range damage, but nothing is tough enough to warrant it and the few foes who are far away and you might want to hurt can be dealt with using your Scrap Cannon. Problem is, the Scrap Cannon uses the game’s currency, Scrap, as ammunition, and since Rodney has a fairly generous health bar, you might just take the blows to avoid wasting cash on firing your weapon.

The moments the Scrap Cannon’s use is required are easy enough to stomach usually though, especially since the opportunities to spend your cash are distributed a bit oddly. The game’s save points also serve as shops and you can always do things like buy health for cheap at them, but the other options depend on the specific save spot and it can take some time for a new useful purchase to appear. If you hadn’t been saving up your Scrap though, that useful tool might be out of your grasp until you’ve beaten the level and lost access to that terminal. Some of the purchasable items are things like behind the scenes content and dances for your Wonderbot which seem like money traps at first until you realize the upgrades to how much scrap you can carry are often so slow you might as well buy these, but if you think that justifies Scrap Cannon usage then that’s because you haven’t seen how it’s damage is pretty close to the wrench’s and aiming it outside of first person can be hindered by the camera. You can get upgrades for your Scrap Cannon but their influence is minimal, even homing not seeming to change the shot’s efficacy much, but other purchases like being able to potentially flag collectibles in the area while looking around in first person mode are worth the effort. The Scrap Cannon is limited in holding one upgrade at a time when really it should have been able to load all four options to maybe give you some incentive to whip it out and make actually burning cash feel like a downside worth the firepower, but instead it feels like a secondary attack option that usually requires special circumstance to incentivize its use and even then its just going to be fired repeatedly until a rather nonthreatening enemy is destroyed.

 

Despite its reliance on platforming, collecting, and simple fights most of the time, Robots for PlayStation 2 does sometimes get inventive.  A few segments involve you piloting a large rolling orb around, usually for short races, once where the orb is more of a character as you need to dodge some light danger to keep them safe, and in perhaps the most intriguing moment, that orb ends up being used for some subterranean platforming in a sewer stage built around its unique controls. Some of that segment feels like it doesn’t really give you the room to do anything besides roll along tracks but then it will open up and require careful navigation on thin platforms with the ball that does provide a challenge, and in a similar vein sometimes the game can ask for a bit of quick action platforming that is a bit more engaging as you near the end. These bright spots are rare, and unfortunately, the two boss fights in the game that are also gameplay shifts in a way are very weak. One has you hitting cannons to try and hit a large boss on the other side of a large gap, but the time a cannon needs to fire and the boss’s unpredictable moments means you’re often smacking and hoping the robot will stop and get hit rather than him deciding he’d rather not be hurt. The final boss on the other hand is a slow waiting game where you have infinite ammo and are stuck in one spot shooting until a small window of opportunity lets you actually shoot something important. Like some of the normal platforming, it feels like these big battles rely more on waiting for things to slowly line up rather than the player being an active participant in ongoing action.

 

One thing I feel odd commending though are the extra bonuses you can unlock at the stores. While some are simple things like concept art, advertisements for other Robots merchandise, or the cutscenes from the adventure that are often repurposed scenes from the movie with Rodney’s dad narrating over them, the voice actor interviews were probably the highlight of the game. Robots for PlayStation 2 didn’t get the full movie cast to reprise their roles. Rodney has a stand-in voice him instead of Ewan McGregor and at first he’s oddly silent in character interactions, simply miming his responses only to speak full sentences at other points and even quip during combat. Stanley Tucci reprises his role as Herb, Rodney’s dad, and perhaps since he is the biggest name on board still they gave him the lines for the narrator role. You won’t hear Amanda Bynes or Robin Williams here and their characters aren’t given much to say or do for it, but during the interviews for the voice cast who did reprise their roles here, you get some interesting windows into some fun personalities. Tucci remains pretty normal, but the kid who voices young Rodney provides a youthful effervescence as the interviewers clearly had fun getting his unique perspective on a child voicing a video game character. Harland Williams who voices a minor character called Lugnut uses his interview almost as an excuse for an eccentric stand-up routine, and Jennifer Coolidge spends almost all her time talking about how fascinated she is with her character Fanny having an enormous butt even though in the game Fanny is a side-character you can actually go the whole game without speaking to. This featurette being as amusing as it is means it being the game’s highlight wouldn’t necessarily mean the rest of the game was awful, but the actual 3D platformer these people lent their voices too is unfortunately a rather flawed product despite their enthusiasm for it.

THE VERDICT: Robots for PlayStation 2 will occasionally hit on a nifty idea like the rolling sphere platforming level or some more involved late game action segments, but mostly this game about an inventor is hardly inventive in its approach to designing challenges. Slowly moving platforms lead to sections that slow things to a crawl with no challenge beyond waiting for things to line up, collectibles will be scattered around open areas more as an errand to complete than a way of linking together challenges under one goal, and your basic attack method is far too simple and effective so any other way to approach combat ends up not worth the effort or material cost. This short adventure unfortunately feels long when it shouldn’t be and the better moments whiz by before you’ve had time to really enjoy the concepts that are quickly put aside. Once you add in a sometimes meddlesome camera to the picture, you’ll see Robots’s component parts simply aren’t compatible with a good time.

 

And so, I give Robots for PlayStation 2…

A BAD rating. Were it a bog-standard platformer Robots would be acceptably forgettable, but while it has many simple pieces that could have been easy enough to accept despite their unambitious designs that don’t test the player much, the totality of the experience keeps hitting on snags that wear it down. The sometimes ornery camera could have been overlooked in a better platformer, but here it is joined with ideas like shallow segments where you wait more than you participate, fights where the game incentivizes you to use your weakest option by making its other attacks costly or comparatively limited, and item collecting segments that are about being thorough instead of asking you to explore an interesting area. Many of these moments are at least easy enough to get through and the rare spark of inspiration can briefly shove aside some of the boredom that sets in from the less imaginative examples of game design, but it’s a counterbalance that can’t bring enough to the table to justify the unexciting trek through the weaker moments.

 

Perhaps the reason I liked the interviews much more than the often generic or outright flawed action the game was meant to draw me in with is that it showed more heart and personality than the game itself. The voice actors were given room to talk about what they wanted and took many different approaches that made for a moment where it felt like you were actually seeing something personal. Robots for PlayStation 2 is a generic experience thrown together to accompany a movie that didn’t really stand out either, and while both can have some inspired moments or almost head in interesting directions, the video game definitely squanders its potential more as it settles into retreading weak ideas or failing to utilize its mechanics to keep things fresh. While I wouldn’t call Robots soulless because of those flickers of potential, it does feel like this game lacks the heart that could have made it more than yet another low quality movie tie-in game.