Custom Robo

Life

Custom Robo is a lot of things (overly simplistic, repetitive, short), but it almost isn’t the one thing it’s supposed to be: An RPG. Your opinion of this game will likely depend on your experience as a gamer (as well as your age) as every aspect of this title seems gauged for young, inexperienced players who are unfamiliar or uncomfortable with the traditional depth and length of RPGs.

The story itself is a messy mixture of futuristic silliness that’s based in a ridiculous post-apocalyptic world where people no longer physically fight each other — instead, they stand face to face with their opponents and engage in virtual combat with their tiny robots
(called ‘custom robos’) in holographic arenas called holiseums. Gameplay is separated into two parts: The button pressing and text reading of the uninspired story segments, and the scripted encounters with enemy robos (there are no random enemy battles).
Rather than leveling up in typical RPG fashion, Custom Robo does away with these genre staples by instead upgrading your character with the seemingly random and haphazard distribution of new robo parts at the end of most battles.

Playing through the game, you get the feeling the developers don’t trust you very much as almost every normal facet of RPG decision making is done for you automatically (the game even auto-saves your data). Losing fights has zero negative repercussions as any
defeat suffered in the holiseums merely results in you retrying the same fight over and over again until you discover the best combination of selectable parts, or you just get lucky.

But for the most part, you never have to worry about this because you rarely lose any fights until very late in the game. Though there are a variety of attacks to choose from, most battles can be easily won by simply relying on your primary weapon and mashing the buttons with furious speed (technique is not a factor here). To the game’s credit, the action in the holiseums can get rather intense with bright lasers and flashing explosions filling the screen, and the game never shows any signs of slowdown, even in four-way
battles.

However, one of the biggest problems with the fighting system is the poorly angled camera, which zooms out to capture the whole stage and makes your character difficult to keep track of. The control scheme is a bit loose as well with all the robos having a slow, sloppy feel to them and, as a result, most battles are determined by pure luck and furious button mashing. While not terrible, the graphics are disappointingly simple with most of
the holiseum levels looking like vector backgrounds from TRON, while the robos themselves look like Fisher-Price renditions of old Transformers.

The sound effects and repetitive techno tunes are substandard for the GameCube, and the incessant beeping that is supposed to represent the voices of the character’s text dialogue is a horrendously annoying and outdated reminder of the days of cartridge RPGs on the Genesis and Super Nintendo (the GameCube can do much better than this).

The game does offer a pleasantly amusing multiplayer mode where you can fight with or against a few friends using the robo parts you unlock in Story mode. But (and this is important) if you didn’t enjoy the frantic and cluttered button-mashing battles in the first
place (complete with sluggish controls and a static camera angle), then this bonus feature will only serve as another reminder of the total mediocrity that is Custom Robo. Sadly, when you combine the small number of areas with the complete lack of any discernable
side-quests, secrets, or mini-games, and the short length of Story mode (most gamers will beat it in a leisurely 15 hours or less) — oh yeah, and let’s not forget the uninspired graphics and conventional techno tunes as well — you are faced with a disappointingly
undersized and shallow RPG experience for GameCube owners.
 
Custom Robo
Requirements: GameCube console
Rating: 70%
Price: TBA

23/08/04

Read More: Gamer