Frobot Hands-On Preview
By:
Micah Seff
|
June 24, 2010, 10:27 pm

 

It's sort of unclear how this happened. One minute, we were riding our elevator back to our hotel room at E3. The next, we were huddled on the floor around our tiny CRT television, playing through a new game headed to WiiWare sometime this year, Frobot. Now, I have to admit that I was not aware of this game before our demo. In fact, I'd never heard to the development studio behind the game, Fugazo, either. Luckily, the game's producer, Andrew Lum, was happy to initiate us into the ways of the 'fro, and in a cramped hotel room, no less!

What do you get when you combine Smash TV with Shaft? That's easy, you get the baddest, robotic mutha-effer you've ever seen. You also get a delightfully charming, low-budget WiiWare game.

One of the first things we noticed when booting up Frobot was the tongue-in-cheek sense of humor present in the game. There are almost more funk-related puns than I can handle (I said almost!), and actually more clever references to funk and disco than I would have assumed. The whole thing feels pretty groovy, and was actually fairly overtly sexual. I'm not sure what sort of rating this game will get, but I can tell you that there was a level of dirtiness in the writing that actually fit the funk-infused tone pretty well.

The game plays from a top-down view. Players move Frobot though his surroundings with the left analog stick, while using the Wiimote's IR pointer to aim. If you've played the Tanks! game that was included in Wii Play, then you know what to expect. I'm a fan of this basic control mechanic, as it gives players the right amount of mobility, while still having a good amount of precision in the aiming.

Most of the game progresses with players working their way through a series of rooms as they head to the level's exit. The levels get progressively more tricky later on, with puzzles spanning several rooms instead of always being self-contained. At this point, there are eight planned levels in the game, each of which will require your fullest trigonometric skills to traverse. That's right, a firm grasp of angles will certainly serve you well in this game, as most of the puzzles involve bouncing shots off walls to hit switches, turrets, and mobile enemies.

The puzzles were actually surprisingly tricky, and left me scratching my head a few times before finding the solution. The puzzle variety certainly seemed to be in place too. While ricocheting your shots was certainly the core focus, Frobot has a number of other items at his disposal that add plenty of diversity to the game. Mines can be used to destroy different parts of the environment. Other items like the seeker missile add some extra fun by allowing the player to steer the projectile in air with the IR pointer after the shot has been fired. The few items we saw seemed to spice things up a bit and kept things from getting stale. Each of the items is apparently upgradeable too, though we didn't get to see these improvements. Hopefully, the final build of the game manages to ramp up Fro-Bots skills steadily to keep gamers interested.

We also got the chance to check out the game's multiplayer. This was a pretty stripped down affair, pitting four players against each other in a free-for-all bout. All of the various gadgets from the game's single-player mode are available in multiplayer. Multiplayer matches ended up being somewhat fun, despite their simple nature. There were only a smattering of arenas in which to fight, and things were always verging on being too hectic, but even still it's hard to deny the appeal that this game held. 

While I really wasn't expecting to see yet another game at E3 this year (much less in my hotel room), I was pretty happy to have Andrew Lum take us through his creation. WiiWare may have been glossed over almost entirely at E3 2010, but that doesn't mean the service has no more goodies to offer. Frobot is planned for a release later this year, so make sure you watch those PR blasts every week to see when it hits WiiWare.

Page URL:
blog comments powered by Disqus