First Impressions With Roboquest
So, it’s been a wild week for releases huh? Destiny 2’s Witch Queen came out on Tuesday and Elden Ring dropped last night. That combined with King of Fighters XV being a game I’m slowly starting to sink time into means that I'm kind of spoiled for choice considering that these are all things I’ve been hyped about for the last year. I’m not talking about any of them this week. The main reason is that for stuff like fighting games and Destiny 2 expansions, I need to take the time to digest them and their systems before I can fully talk about them without coming off like a know-nothing know-it-all (the worst kind of know-it-all), and in the case of Elden Ring, I’m simply waiting for the PC version to be less jank before I get to it, and that’d take a while to jump my way through considering it’s basically a full Dark Souls game with a meticulously detailed open world wrapped around it. But since those are not in ideal states for me to write about, it’s time to go back to Roguelikeville to look at Roboquest, a neat early access game that came out on Gamepass a few days ago.
Roboquest is an FPS roguelike with a comic book-influenced style that’s set in the year 2700 and humanity is on the brink of extinction following a robot uprising a young scavenger named Max finds a Guardian android and proceeds to repair it, from there they travel the wastelands looking for answers and means for humanity’s survival. Despite the gravitas of that setup, the entire thing is played entirely tongue in cheek. The entire thing carries itself with the energy of Borderlands, but with way less soon-to-be dated references and more of a focus on fighting off killer robots as a robot.
The game starts off with the Guardian being rebooted by Max for the first time and asking how the settings go, the most important being the placement of the cursor. It’s by default lower than a standard crosshair is usually so that you can get a better look at the more vertical parts of the screen, and while it does do well on that front, I prefer the default placement because it makes it easier to get the crit shots off correctly. From there you start off doing runs in the canyons and from there go into valleys, clean future tech cities, and more blasting and bashing robots scum as you go. The canyons themselves are linear as heck and only show off one path per area and the beginnings of a loot room. And then there’s the out-of-run logistics, where you spend the wrenches you get from completing biomes and killing bosses to upgrade your basecamp with a variety of things, like larger weapon and item pools, keepsakes that augment your play style, and even unlock additional playable characters once certain requirements are met. These are done in this way because this is the game maker’s way of easing the player into the flow of things, which is a good idea because the actual gameplay parts are incredibly dense.
When you start a run, you get an item and an additional weapon aside from your pistol that determines the way you play for the duration of the run. There are four weapon types to choose from that are a matter of preference because they can all get the job done: Ballistics are bullet based conventional weapons, Technology is the future sci-fi energy weapon category, Precision is for you Bows and Scoped Weapons, and lastly, Demolitions is the category for blowing shit up with a lot of high powered explosives. There are over 50 weapons spread across these four categories and they all have their strengths and weaknesses based on how you level up your proficiencies with each. I tend to stick to the Ballistics and Demolitions for the most part because they gel the best with the Guardian’s natural tackiness and I’m a man of simple tastes; I see a good shotgun and good explosions and my synapses fire off more than usual. And the best part of all of these radically different weapons is that they are all feel fucking fantastic to pull the triggers on, personal favorites being a pair of sawed-off double-barreled shotguns that made me feel like Reaper from Overwatch minus the edge and the moral grossness of playing a Blizzard game these days and a goddamn, honest to goodness, life-stealing chainsaw. Because fuck balance, let’s have some fun.
As an Early Access title, Roboquest still has a way to go, but it still feels like a good way to spend an evening when you just want to turn your brain off and kill robots. Check it out if you got Game Pass.
