(originally published 25th January 2016 on DVS Gaming)
Heatbox Games’ Robots in the Wild is a quirky 2D puzzle-based tower defense game. Heatbox was founded by Minneapolis beat-boxer and game developer Aaron “Heatbox” Heaton, who spent four years developing his first ever commercial game. He describes the game in the press release as “just dropping different shaped Blocks from the sky… But it becomes so much more when you start building Robots to do specific things like seeing in the dark, attacking monsters . . . and having them make Blocks to help you build morerobots”. At the time of writing, we only had the demo of the game to review.
The game starts off describing how peaceful robots on a massive mothership were hit by a gigantic asteroid, scattering their blocks and <HEARTS> across the galaxy. These <HEARTS> are the most precious Robots of all, and it is up to the player to protect them until the Rescue Robot arrives. The number of nights to survive increase with each level. To protect these Robots, the game features a Tetris-like gameplay where the player creates different Robots from seemingly randomly generated block shapes. These newly created Robots can be used as a power source, defense system or even lighting to protect the <HEART> Robot within the set period of time before the Rescue Robot arrives.
Sticking to his roots, Heaton beatboxed all the sound effects and voices in the game himself, which seem mediocre at best. However, the sound effect with one of the huge dinsosaur monsters sounded great. The introduction and “Menubot” are graphically simplistic and there could have been more effort placed into the visual presentation of this part of the game. Once you got past the average introduction, the game itself is good puzzler. It can be fustrating at times when blocks needed to complete important Robots take longer to spawn. The key to this game is speed and quick thinking. Building up your defense system as quickly as possible during the daylight hours to protect your fortress against not only monsters during the day, but flying creatures that explode on your fortress at night!
Getting your structure perfect to defend against the next attack can become frustrating, addicting and engrossing. You may find yourself restarting a level several times just so you can get your fortress perfect to defend against creatures that want to get to the <HEART>. At times though, there may be several of the same block, unable to be used for anything useful (other than to feed into the Recyclerbot). The inability to move blocks once they have been placed is a little hindering, although it lends to this style of gameplay. Graphically, the game is quite simplistic with lots of bright colours and clean lines. Even the nighttime scene is aesthetically pleasing with different planetary backdrops in each level. A clearer font for the text could have been used, as it was hard to read at times. Overall though, the game is good to look at while you race to build and defend your fortress.
There was only a limited number of defensive Robots to build and although we had just a demo, there weren’t many Robots types to build. There was only a choice of two shooting-type defensive Robots. However, with a good combination of robots together and a high fortress , and it became quite easy to defend the <HEART> through the allotted time. The attacking creatures are interesting, ranging from killer plants, flying pterodactyls and huge dinosaur-looking monsters. The sound effects sometimes sounded good, but at other times just bizzare and out of place in this video game.
Overall the game is a decent game for those who enjoy the genre. Its a nice little puzzler with bright colours and retro music that’s good to play between other games. However, after a few hours spent on the game, it becomes slightly repeatitive. Monsters get bigger and your defensive tower gets higher, but there is not a huge amount of variation to keep the player occupied for long in this demo. A nice little puzzle game that is easy to pick up and can be played on a casual basis. We give it 3 out of 5 stars.
Images © 2016 Heatbox Games.
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