Quite a few of us could empathise with Billy. He’s a robot who’s tired of the nine-to-five, working in a factory, day after day. So, he makes the decision to sod it and blow everything up. Now, that’s a tad drastic, but we’re sure that a few people agree with the underlying sentiment.
To achieve his goal, Billy doesn’t start with many abilities. He can jump, which is about the minimum you’d expect from a main character in any platformer. He also has a raygun, which is more like it, but he hasn’t packed any ammo for it (cheers Billy!). You have to find that ammo, scattered as it is about the levels, and only then can you murder everyone.
By murdering everyone, you clear the path to the exit portal. Then you’re onto the next of thirty levels of jumping, ammo-gathering and murdering, before you reach the big boss and free yourself from the yoke of oppression. That is how astonishingly simple Billy 101 is.
The complications come in the form of a few upgrades, downloadable from a friendly computer every ten levels or so. They come in traditional flavours like the double-jump, but they also come in some more idiosyncratic flavours too: a grapple lets you pull crates towards you, while another has you teleport-dashing across a short distance.
With these new additions, the levels become a tad more fiendish. The teleport-dash can take you past corridors of lasers, or quickly send you round the back of an enemy. The grapple is the best of the bunch, as it can be used creatively to yank a TNT or block onto the heads of some robots chatting below. Or perhaps you needed those blocks to reach a platform higher up? Billy 101 starts to show its platform-puzzling chops.
Since you’re getting upgrades, the enemies get upgrades too. Kamikaze robots rush headlong at you, forcing you into a quick decision: are you going to run or jump out of the way? Rocket-launcher robots fire homing missiles at you that offer fewer options. You’re just going to be running. Luckily, friendly-fire is in play, so those rockets and exploding robots can be used to clear paths of your own.
Initially, Billy 101 presents as a stripped down action-platform game. It’s a single-screen Mega Man, but with a limited number of shots. Since you don’t have any upgrades, the closest you get to a puzzle is whether you attack a robot head on or round the back. The enjoyment comes from finding the path that is least likely to get you obliterated.
There’s not much enjoyment to these levels, if we’re being completely honest with ourselves. When Billy 101 is in action-platformer mode, it shows its limitations. It’s not fast or reflexive enough to really work in this genre, and the levels are so simplistic that you’ll soon get bored. The biggest problem to solve is often finding the enemy robot’s range and staying out of it, before firing a single volley into their chestplate. It’s not what we would call thrilling.
Billy 101 is instead at its best when it trusts itself to be a puzzle game. Using the grapple or rush to navigate a room safely is a fine problem to solve. Crates, which were just decoration in the earlier parts of the game, suddenly become vital: do you use them as steps or death-from-above? Billy 101 absolutely has the capability of being a fine platform-puzzle game, and a few of its levels are a great combination of finding a solution and then executing on it.
Which makes it all the more bewildering why Billy 101 keeps defaulting back to twitchy, action-based levels. Instead of working out the best route, you’re confronted with rocket enemies and suicide-bombers that you can’t avoid. So, you’re stuck running away, finding enough time and space to complete the level.
These levels are not where Billy 101 shines, not least because we’ve played so many better games like it. Billy 101 is not a Metal Slug or Contra: it can’t hope to make gunplay or evasion fun, and the unforgiving collision detection and slow speed means that it’s more wooden than slick. On more than one occasion, we looked for a clever solution to a level, only to sigh and accept that we were probably going to default to some dodging and quickfire shooting.
Billy 101 can’t make up its mind. Either it’s an action-platformer or it’s a puzzle-platformer. We’re shouting from the audience, trying to persuade it to take the puzzle-platformer path, but it shrugs and sits down, refusing to choose between the two. It’s a shame, as there’s a decent brainteaser here, and it’s got a grapple upgrade in its locker that lends itself perfectly to some puzzles.
Billy 101 too often opts for some simple dodging and shooting, and it’s not particularly great at either. Like Billy himself, we wanted to blow everything up and start again, rebuilding it with a focus on the puzzles that it is perfectly capable of doing well. Instead, Billy 101 ends up entirely unremarkable and forgettable: just another budget game trundling off the Xbox conveyor belt.
You can buy Billy 101 from the Xbox Store
