A Sokoban Without A Point From The ReactorX Crew
I knew I recognised RoboHero! This is developed by Lovixsama, who was responsible for the ReactorX trilogy. It has the same visored robot, the same sokoban-style crate-pushing, and the same art-style. It is, in almost every conceivable way, a ReactorX sequel. A cynical voice in my head wonders whether ReactorX 3 didn’t do too well, so a titular reset was in order.
For the 99% who have never played a ReactorX game, RoboHero deserves an explanation. You play a robot on the newly discovered exoplanet Xeran. The press materials give the robot a fancy job title – robot-expeditor – but the truth is it’s an interstellar warehouse worker. You’re moving crates from one location to another. Except you don’t get lunchbreaks as you’re a robot.
It makes RoboHero a sokoban puzzle game. They’re just about the most common game genre on the Xbox Store, which immediately throws down the robo-gauntlet to RoboHero: how can it stand out when it’s got so much budget competition?
To Me, To You
RoboHero opts for an approach to sokoban that is less focused on brainpower. Games like Cute Bonfire and The Cute Whale use tight, unforgiving spaces to create puzzles. With so little room to work with, you tend to maneuver boxes and the avatar around, creating space and desperately avoiding corners. These games are difficult, requiring multiple Undos and Resets.
RoboHero does nothing of the sort. Its arenas are huge, so you’d have to try pretty hard to fail; there are multiple solutions; the crates can not only be pushed, but they can be pulled, too. It means that, if you happen to negligently leave a crate in a corner, you can just pull it out again (RoboHero oddly calls this move an ‘Undo’, but it’s far more useful than that. You can yank your crate to any square on the board).
I’m not sure what you’d call this version of a sokoban. It’s more interested in the process, I suppose, so a procoban? RoboHero is more concerned about the order you do things, rather than the squares you move to and from. So, you’re questioning which box to start with, and which gate.
Why Are There No Fork-Lifts In The Future?
I’m being kind to RoboHero here, as the answers to each puzzle are always self-evident (well, maybe not always – there was one level, 27 I think, where I questioned whether to move crate A or crate B first. In the end, it didn’t matter: I could have started with either). RoboHero is lacking in challenge to the degree that you wonder about the motive. Is it being nice because it wants something?
It’s the thought that’s been rattling around my head since completing RoboHero. I just don’t understand why this game exists. It is, if anything, a de-make of the ReactorX games. Those games were easy, but this one is even easier. Where they were minimalist, this cuts even more out. What purpose is there in distilling the formula further? All I can think of is the Gamerscore. The series has always been a Gamerscore paradise, with 2000G for each title, and this is no different. Is the sole reason to keep feeding achievement hunters?
If we were to give RoboHero due credit, we would aim it at the soundtrack and level ingredients. The soundtrack is a bop, and doesn’t outstay its welcome. And the level ingredients – by which we mean the keys, pits, gates and switches in RoboHero – at least offer some variety. We mentioned Cute Bonfire and The Cute Whale earlier. Neither of those two mix the box-pushing up with additional mechanics. RoboHero very much does, so we don’t take that effort for granted. It was nice to have some roadbumps to navigate over.
Sokobah-Humbug
Here comes the ‘just’: we just wish these ingredients were put to more use than ‘here’s a thing to do’. In most levels there is one key and one door. There’s no question of which door to open first, and there’s no danger of getting locked in by a decision. When there are switches, the order is pre-determined. You can only reach one by activating another. There’s no strategising to be done: RoboHero is just a series of motions to go through.
Which makes RoboHero a very odd proposition indeed. It looks like a puzzle game, barks like a puzzle game, but doesn’t have any of the friction that would make it feel like a puzzle game. Without difficulty, can a game still be a puzzle game? There’s an existential question for you.
We ended up pocketing our 2000G and feeling rather guilty about it. We definitely didn’t earn it. We mostly pushed boxes in the one and only direction that they could be pushed in. It felt like we’d been given one of those participation medals that people keep complaining about. We were rewarded for turning up, rather than pulling off anything of value.
A Puzzle-less Puzzler
There’s only one group of people who would get anything from RoboHero, and that’s achievement hounds. For everyone else, RoboHero is the most challenge-less puzzle game that we can recall. It’s a sudoku with only one number still to be filled out; a wordsearch with all the irrelevant letters redacted. It’s a puzzle in search of a point.
Important Links
Buy RoboHero, Optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/robohero/9P8KNFQMJB6W
Xbox One edition, anyone? – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/robohero-xbox-one/9P3405VZX94R/0010
The Love & Robots Bundle adds in the Ah, Love! games – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/love-robots/9PC28M0WP1VB/0010
