Bad Bots

My honest first impression of Bad Bots was something like recognition: here is a solo developer staring down the ghost of 1990s PC run-and-guns and trying, with earnest heart, to resurrect them on a GameMaker budget. Vanni del Moral of Point Five Projects built this entirely himself, and the seams show, but so does the genuine love underneath them. You play as Sam McRae, the lone survivor aboard the Titan Hauler, a cargo spaceship whose robotic crew has been reprogrammed to kill after you woke from cryosleep. The premise is pure B-movie sci-fi, delivered through comic book-style cutscenes that actually carry a certain charm. The art design, bold and slightly garish, channels a 90s action aesthetic that suits the tone perfectly. The structure is a linear campaign across roughly 170 rooms spanning distinct sections of the ship, including the Evacuation Bay, Mechanical Shafts, and Robot Workshops. You carry two weapons at a time - a default machine gun plus swappable secondary pickups - and you face off against a handful of enemy types: stationary gun-bots that barely react, knife bots that charge in packs and stun-lock you, spider-like cleaning bots that swarm and electrocute, and seven named bosses with distinctive gimmicks like Flamebot's fire spreads and Jack Hammer's piston attacks. There is also a Challenge Mode built around three timed survival variants - practice, rush, and panic - each asking you to last 60 seconds against endless waves for a high score. No online leaderboards, just your own personal benchmark. Here is where honesty matters. The campaign plays well for the first thirty minutes, then the seams get harder to ignore. Corridor after corridor unfolds identically. Enemy difficulty scales by volume rather than variety - more of the same robots in the same formations - and the shooting never develops any tactical depth beyond holding the fire button and staying mobile. The handful of horde rooms where the door locks and the bots swarm do create brief, genuine tension, but they recycle that trick so often that the panic becomes routine. The soundscape is sparse in ways that feel unintentional: large stretches of the game carry no music at all, only gun pops and mechanical ambience. When the score does arrive, during boss fights and cutscenes, it evokes 80s sci-fi action in a way that actually works, which makes the silence elsewhere feel like a missed opportunity rather than an artistic choice. Key binding is not customizable on keyboard and mouse, which is a friction point. What Bad Bots has going for it is honesty about what it is. It does not pretend to be Metroid. The controls respond cleanly, the controller support works well, and the whole campaign can be finished in two to three hours without much fuss. The comic book cutscenes and the slightly unhinged robot character designs carry a handcrafted personality that larger productions can not fake. At the sub-5 tier it lands in now, the calculation is different than it was at full launch price in 2013. The craft is rough, the ambition is narrow, but there is a specific kind of player - the one who wants 90 minutes of brainless spaceship corridor blasting with some nostalgia attached - who will leave satisfied. Everyone else should temper expectations firmly.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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