Walking around the multitudinous booths and the general insanity of PAX, I spied a bizarre little game starring an afro puffed robot. As a fan of robots and Dr. J style afros, I knew I had to check it out. On a side note, I think my spell check is racist. It refuses to recognize afro as a word. But if we can somehow find a way to get past culturally insensitive spell checking software, there is a game to talk about.

Frobot is a hybrid puzzle/shooter starring one well coiffed little robot on a mission to save his five super fine robot girlfriends. Gameplay takes place in a top down perspective as you solve puzzles and blow up other robots. I’m a little bit Wii-tarded, so any game that requires moving around and using a cursor by aiming at the screen feels off to me. It is even worse when people are watching me try to solve puzzles while I am busy accidentally exploding myself over and over. As a semi-professional games journalist, I managed to shrug off the laughter of onlookers and continued to explode myself in a glorious fashion.

If you can find the right group of people, multiplayer could be very intense. I told the PR girl that it felt like a combination of Bomberman and Combat for the Atari. She then looked at me like I was crazy and asked, “Do you mean like Wii Tanks?”

After the PR girl made me feel old, I totally owned her with a combination of skillful shot placement and her letting me win. The basic set up feels a lot like Bomberman with the shooting from (sigh) Wii Tanks. You are thrown into a variety of arenas and try to blow each other up. The difference is the much wider variety of weapons and defensive tools you are given. Weapons include bullets, missiles, mines, and even a remote controlled exploding disco ball. Bullets ricochet off of walls like Captain America’s shield and you can guide the explosive disco ball by pointing the Wii-mote.

From my limited time with the game, I wasn’t really sold on the single player campaign. But if you are a fan of Bomberman or Atari Combat and you have some friends that enjoy exploding, I would check out the multi-player when the game releases later this year.

Tags: Captain America, Frobot, PAX, PAX '10, PAX 2010 COVERAGE, Wii, WiiWare

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 7th, 2010 at 5:00 am and is filed under Features, Indie Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.