I’ve often wished that more casual developers would take the time and effort to put out a good, well-written, role-playing game. It’s a genre which doesn’t get nearly enough attention in the casual market, probably due in no small part to the enormous amount of time it takes to pen and program a full length RPG story into a game (and if your story sucks, it’s all wasted time). Fortunately, Moonpod has stepped up and delivered Mr. Robot to help fill that void. With elements taken from puzzlers, platformers, and RPGs, Mr. Robot is an interesting genre mish-mash that actually works really well.

You play as a cheerfully helpful service robot named Asimov on a ship called the Eidolon, which is carrying hundreds of frozen humans to a new colony. When the ship’s brain starts malfunctioning and some of the robots start getting a little crazy, it falls to you to save the humans and your robot friends. You do this by scooting around the Eidolon and hacking into the malfunctioning robots brains. En route to these robots, you have to solve many puzzles, push crates around, activate switches, and navigate around any number of things you’d generally expect a well-designed space ship not to have (pools of dangerous liquid in robot work areas?).

The RPG elements come into play while you’re hacking the robots, and you’ll be moving from node to node within a matrix and possibly encountering enemy programs to fight. At the end of the node is a boss you need to defeat to return the robots to their normal state. The combat is standard fare with minor term differences, so if you’ve ever played an RPG it’ll feel pretty intuitive. To aid you in battle, you’ll pick up various programs and defense shields along the way that you can equip to your robots’ “ghosts” as they’re called, and you can use items you find as well.

Something that did bug me was that combat felt a little slow at times, and I wished that Asimov would actually run over and hit the enemies instead of doing the simple “step forward, swing, step back, damage numbers appear across the screen” thing. It would have done a lot to liven up combat.

Overall, the game looks really good though. The music and sound didn’t strike me as very memorable, but they weren’t bad, and the graphics are great. The amount of detail that Moonpod’s artists put into the various rooms is evident and appreciated, right down to the robots’ tiny names scrawled in cute leetspeak on their chests. The walls are full of colorful switches and buttons, and the textures for the metal and liquid areas are very shiny and pleasing to the eye.

Also, the writing is pretty good. That’s one thing that an RPG has to do well, and they did. The beginning was a little slow for my taste (it’s a forced tutorial), but I got sucked in almost immediately when they got to the heart of the problem, and I found the various robot personalities very cute if somewhat one-dimensional. Fantasy and sci-fi geeks will also appreciate little easter eggs thrown into the dialogue (the intelligent, brooding, somewhat evil-seeming robot who aides you is named Raistlin, for example).

All said, you should probably stop reading this review and go try it if you’re at all of an RPG fan. Moonpod clearly spent a lot of time, energy, and love on this game, and it really shows. It’s an excellent addition to the casual action/adventure genre, and definitely worth a few minutes of your time to have a look.

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(3 votes, average: 3.67 out of 5)

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