Big Hero 6 Bot Fight Review: Robot & Dragons

Disney’s Big Hero 6 is an animated movie about crime-fighting robots and the human heroes that tag along with them. Big Hero 6: Bot Fight is likewise all about robots at war, though the act of fighting is a bit …

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Disney’s Big Hero 6 is an animated movie about crime-fighting robots and the human heroes that tag along with them. Big Hero 6: Bot Fight is likewise all about robots at war, though the act of fighting is a bit more hands-off than you’d expect.

Indeed, Big Hero 6: Bot Fight is a puzzle / battle game that’s very much like GungHo’s wildly popular Puzzle & Dragons, albeit simplified just a touch for younger players. Older players will find it overly-familiar, but small heroes will enjoy themselves. At any rate, Big Hero 6: Bot Fight is much more engaging than some of the oatmeal-flavored movie / game tie-ins Disney has released.

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The plot for Bot Fight is pretty sparse – no doubt to veer away from massive movie spoilers. A number of the movie’s heroes and characters still show up however, including protagonist Hiro Hamada and his marshmallow-like robot, Baymax.

Neither hero features in the game as prominently as the battle robots, however. Instead of collecting and raising monsters a la Puzzle & Dragons, Bot Fight has you gather and train different kinds of robots.

You find robots by entering missions and fighting enemy bots. You can also grab robots from the lucky cat capsule game. The robots vary in power and elemental strengths, with rarer bots generally being more powerful than their common counterparts.

Fights are controlled via a puzzle grid. To attack, you make matches of three or more using elemental-themed pieces. When a match is made, any robots bearing the same element launch an attack. Ideally, to deal serious damage, you should pull off combos that engage more than a single robot.

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The robot designs in Big Hero 6: Bot Fight are a blast. If you’re a bit tired of dragons and goblins, the modernized metal warriors make for a nice change – not to mention great collecting incentive.

That incentive may even be enough to keep hardcore Puzzle & Dragons fans playing despite Bot Fight’s familiarity and lack of depth. You can’t displace game pieces with others, which makes it a bit of a simplistic puzzle / battle experience.

Each session of Bot Fight also gobbles up big chunks of stamina, which means waiting around for recovery following short play sessions. The game is also far less generous with free samples of its hard currency (Prisms) compared to Puzzle & Dragons. Unsurprisingly, Prisms are necessary to summon hard-hitting rare robots for your team.

Big Hero 6: Bot Fight isn’t the best puzzle / battle game on the digital marketplace, but kids that download it on the car ride home from the movie will love the action, character cameos, and the clank-clank of robot battles. Though to be fair, anyone of any age can enjoy the clank-clank of robot battles, right?

The good

  • Great robot designs.
  • Kids will enjoy battling and collecting robots.

The bad

  • Game plays very closely to other puzzle / battle games.
  • Stamina system depletes very quickly.
70 out of 100
In the early aughts, Nadia fell into writing with the grace of a brain-dead bison stumbling into a chasm. Over the years, she's written for Nerve, GamePro, 1UP.com, USGamer, Pocket Gamer, Just Labs Magazine, and many other sites and magazines of fine repute. She's currently About.com's Guide to the Nintendo 3DS at ds.about.com.