Robokill Review

Twin stick shooters are a dime a dozen on the App Store nowadays, but few of them really pay homage to what’s come before. Robokill breaks from this trend, offering a terrific new top down shooter experience that harkens back to the days of Smash TV.

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Slaughtering robots is ALWAYS a good time

Twin stick shooters are a dime a dozen on the App Store nowadays, but few of them really pay homage to what’s come before. Robokill breaks from this trend, offering a terrific new top down shooter experience that harkens back to the days of Smash TV.

Robokill tells the story of a space station overrun by homicidal robots. It’s up to you, a well-armed human in a mech suit, to clear deck after deck of killer robots in an effort to quell their kill-crazy uprising. The controls here should feel familiar to anyone who’s played an iOS twin stick shooter before: a virtual stick on the left will control your movement, while a virtual stick on the right will control the direction of your fire. Beyond that, however, Robokill feels far less cookie cutter than many of the games in the genre.

The first thing players will notice is that, rather than offering up bite-sized arcade gameplay via timed levels or endless modes, Robokill offers up a highly structured single player experience. Players will enter a room, clear it of robots, and then move on to another room. In this regard the experience clearly draws its roots from the aforementioned Smash TV. Each deck of the space station can be seen as a level, and each level is made up of dozens of rooms that connect in a variety of ways.These levels all have an objective that you’re trying to reach, so you’ll make regular use of the game’s map to make sure you’re taking the right path to reach your goals.

Robokill

Even though you could make a bee line straight for your objectives, exploring every room on each level has benefits all on its own. Some rooms hold treasures filled with cash. Others may offer up enemies who will drop new weapons for you to equip. All will let you earn XP by slaughtering robots, which in turn will help you level up – and in Robokill, levelling up is just as important as unleashing hot robot death.

Most twin stick shooters offer up a variety of weapons that can be picked up, used up, and disposed of. Robokill takes a different approach, employing RPG style equipment, levels, and upgrades. While their implementation isn’t very deep, it doesn’t really need to be either. Players will earn XP, which in turn will allow them climb levels and equip new items. These items can be found as drops from dead robots, but they can also be purchased in a store using the funds you’ve collected throughout the game.

Players have four weapon slots and four item slots, and you’ll constantly be working towards putting better equipment together to improve your performance. You’ll have a good variety of weapons to choose from, and each of these comes in a variety of flavors depending on what you’re able to equip. Take the blaster, for example. It comes in light, medium, and heavy versions, but each of these could be modified to shoot multiple enemies, freeze opponents, and more. Items are just as important as weapons. Some will give your shields a boost after clearing a room, some will increase the value of the cash you’ll find – the list goes on and on.

Robokill

Robokill is also a sizable offering. With 13 different decks to clear, each progressively bigger than the last, you’ll easily find yourself clocking in far more hours than you might expect from the small price point.

There are only a few complaints to be had with Robokill, and honestly, we’re just nitpicking. The iTunes page advertises an “awesome original soundtrack,” but outside of the menus, the only sound we ever heard was gunfire. And while the rooms are designed to make players worry about falling off the edge and dying, sometimes these deadly gaps aren’t as noticeable as they probably should be. Asides from these two small hiccups, though, the experience was pretty much flawless.

In a marketplace crowded with similar competition, Robokill manages to stand out by simultaneously paying homage to a classic while introducing a top notch weapons and equipment system, a lengthy campaign, and an accessible yet challenging level of difficulty. If you’re a fan of the genre but haven’t felt impressed in awhile, Robokill is an easy choice for your next iOS purchase.

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      80 out of 100
      Jim Squires is the Editor-in-Chief of Gamezebo. Everything you see passes his eyes first, so we like to think of him as "the gatekeeper of cool stuff." He likes good games, great writing, and just can't say no to a hamburger. Also, he is not a bear.