Nerd Girl Thoughts

I’ve selected 15 games that I’ve never played from my Steam library and committed to playing each one for at least 45 minutes this month. Robothorium is the fourth game I played from this project.

Robothorium – at least when you look at all its component parts – should be a really enjoyable game. It’s got a cool sci-fi plot, casting the player in the role of an AI fighting for robot independence from the people who wish to keep them enslaved. It’s got plenty of loot, and a decent variation in potential party members right from the outset. There are a handful of factions which will like you (or not) based on decisions you make throughout the campaign. There’s even crafting – or so I’m told, because an hour into the game, I haven’t unlocked the crafting system yet, although I’ve accumulated a whole lot of materials in my seemingly endless inventory.

My biggest problem is that it plays painfully slow. You will spend a lot of time moving from room to room, rolling the dice as far as dealing with traps & other interactables. The game lets you know the chance of success, but gives no real indication of why that percentage is what it is. While it’s possible I could have missed something, the game gives you a lot of icons indicating … something … but never really explains what they mean. This wasn’t really an issue for me, as I was playing on the lowest difficulty, but I could see myself being really annoyed by it if I were coming up against any real challenges.

I could even forgive that if the combat felt really satisfying, but it’s more of the same feeling of dragging oneself through molasses. Most of your available abilities add to your heat, and if you hit or pass 100 heat by using an ability, that party member will be forced to skip a turn to cool down. While this system is very effective at preventing you from just spamming each party member’s best ability, it also means that combat drags on forever.

It feels a bit ironic that I started this project because I was finding myself impatient with new games, and now I’ve played two back to back which were unusually tedious. I spent just about an hour with Robothorium, and I don’t see myself going back to it. An intriguing plot with interesting factions isn’t enough to make me push through overly long missions with unsatisfying combat, especially since there’s no way to save mid-mission.