3/5 ★ – vassm's review of Robots.

"Robots" was a mediocre movie tie-in that missed the mark by a mile. I had no idea a "Robots" game even existed, and as a huge fan of the movie, I was thrilled to discover it. While the game has its moments, it falls short of capturing the charm and depth of the original film. As a movie tie-in, it loosely retells the story but does so in a very vague, watered down way. The original "Robots" had a heartfelt message and a well-crafted narrative with amazing characters throughout, and this game completely missed that. I might've been more forgiving if it weren't a direct adaptation of the movie, but since it was, the shitty retelling is hard to ignore. On the technical side, the game ran suprisingly smoothly with a few hiccups here and there with the checkpoints and saves. The gameplay itself was fun but aggrivating at times. Objectives were rarely clear, leaving me to wander through the levels with little direction. Thank god the puzzles were easy enough to figure out, though the level design was painfully repetitive. Nearly every mission boiled down to "collect X amount of scraps to progress", with little variation in level design. And, I know this game is essentially a collectathon, and that's fine, but damn at least spruce up the levels a little bit? The worst part was missing one or two pieces which meant scouring massive levels with no hints AT ALL. That alone took up like 60% of my gameplay D: The devs paraphrased the shit out of the story, so much to the point that all the set pieces from the movie were completely taken out. There were so many sections from the movie they could've translated into gameplay, yet they went with the boring and cheap route. They just took an environment from the movie, and slapped some platforms and collectables on there and called it a "level" lol. The game had inconsistent voice acting as well which sucked. Most characters were recast, and some had no voice lines at all... it was a bit uncanny hearing different voices come out of iconic characters. It just didn't work for this specific IP. On the bright side I think the game visually holds up well for its time! Granted I played it on a CRT like its meant to lmao. The reason I'm giving this game this many stars is because of the IP itself and honestly the fire music. The racing portions were super fun as well, and that was a great break from all the collectathon stuff. There was moments where you were able to talk to NPCs and they could give you some things to do for rewards which was great. Unfortunately, this dies off after like the first three hours, but it was fun while it lasted! Overall, I probably would've enjoyed this more as a kid, back when I wasn't able to be critical of games due to the size of my brain, but as it stands "Robots" felt like a dull, muted version of a movie that deserved far far better :( 7/10