Robot Rescue Revolution Review (PS3)

Robot Rescue Revolution is a strategy puzzle game for the PlayStation 3, which tasks you with guiding multiple robots to a goal while navigating treacherous terrain. Available for a relatively slender figure from the PlayStation Store, the title includes three worlds to explore and over 100 levels to complete.

The core gameplay involves directing the robots on each level to an exit while avoiding all of the hazardous objects in your path, such as pitfalls, fire, and high-voltage electricity. These traps will all destroy your robot with a single touch and send you back to the beginning of the level, so you need to remain sharp.

As you’d expect from a title of this ilk, the stages get progressively harder by including a mix of different gadgets that require an additional level of forethought. These gizmos include buttons that activate doors, to cloning devices which add more mechanical beings to the level. These contraptions do help to mix up the otherwise bland objectives, but the game still gets repetitive over time.

At the conclusion of each level you are evaluated based on the amount of moves that you made and the time that it took you to reach the exit, and then you’re given an overall score. The tally for each stage is totted up and automatically uploaded to the online leaderboards, which does offer some incentive to replay certain segments if you’re feeling particularly competitive.

Much like the game itself, the controls are super simple, allowing you to use either the analogue stick or d-pad to move your robots in a desired direction. You can also employ the right analogue stick to adjust the game’s camera angle if you so choose.

Meanwhile, the visuals are vibrant, but this can make it hard to decipher some of the more important details on some levels. This often resulted in us overlooking a robot, obstacle, or exit completely, subsequently preventing us from progressing. At least the music is calming, which is exactly what’s required in this kind of game.

In addition to the lengthy single-player mode, there’s also a co-operative option for two players. This is split into two types of levels – co-operative and competitive – and comes with additional stages that aren’t available in the solo campaign. In the head-to-head encounters, you must race against your friend in split-screen to get your robots to the end first. In co-op, however, you must work together in a bigger area, but you still have individual control over your character. We found the competitive stages fun, but the co-op levels frustrating, as if one robot dies, both players will be forced to restart the entire level.

Finally, the game allows you to compose your own stage. The level editor comes with a full-range of gadgets, machines, and obstacles from the main campaign, allowing you to concoct a map of your own. It’s a neat addition, but it doesn’t really make up for the often dismal gameplay.

And that’s the real problem with this release. We played the game from beginning to end without ever so much as smiling, because the experience can be quite tedious at times. It plays just fine, but the dreary mechanics and repetitive gameplay make it a bit of a chore to complete.