Continuing down my steam library alphabetically, we have… Death by Gameshow. No idea where this came from. I load it up and am welcomed to a polished cartoony kind of universe ruled by sarcastic robots. The premise is that they are running you, the human, through a series of death trap levels for their entertainment.

You jump in to a couple of pretty brief introductory levels. On each level you are basically dropped from a rocket on what I would describe as something like the tiny planet in Rick and Morty, and then given a basic objective to complete to clear the level and get back in your rocket. The objectives are basically: Kill everything in a certain amount of time, survive a certain amount of time, or accumulate a certain amount of $ in destruction.

You walk left and right around little planets of varying sizes. All pretty small. The backgrounds are populated with a bunch of sarcastic signs with occasional tips. Your character is a little fat astronaut with glasses, a stand in I guess for what the programmers thought their average player would look like.

The basic mechanic of the game is simple – your character has a floating robot locker following it with an energy bar that shits out robots at an energy cost. The energy bar is constantly recharging, but if you burn it out it’s like overheating a gun, your locker robot falls on its back and you have to drag it around slowly until you let the energy bar fully recharge. You can still use the energy to burn robots, but your movement is slowed.

The robots along the bottom are numbered, so you walk around with WASD and tap 1,2,3,2,2,3,1,2, and so on to tap out a series of robots to counteract whatever the enemy buildings are crapping out or shooting at you. Your base units include a couple of kamikaze bots, some attackers and some blocker/tank units, and a building repair bot.

The basic gameplay is engaging enough that I was pretty happy playing through the first 15 or 20 levels. The objectives are simple but clearing them with higher scores gives you extra financial bonuses. The tension between the speed that you can produce robots, the different obstacles and the choices of bots to send out creates a nice rhythm of meaningful little choices that guide a satisfying little tug of war game.

That’s the good part. Boom zap smash, little droids of various complimentary skills pop out and reek havoc on your robot opponent.

The basic robots on the left just cost energy, but as you can see at the bottom bar of the picture above, towards the right there are robots and abilities that have limited quantities. These you can buy for exorbitant prices in the menu screen between levels, or you can win them at items from the little wheel of fortune feature (the red nail towards the bottom left) which accumulates “spins” the more destruction you cause.

The abilities on the bottom right are for your character. They speed you up, give energy boosts, heal you, increase your timer, or give you weapons to replace your claw (which is just used to grab loot drops).

After 10 levels or so, you’re introduced to one more major game component: buildings. Turns out in addition to robots, you can create most of the offensive buildings you are destroying. The only thing you can’t create are the factory buildings enemies use to crank our droids, which is covered by the powers of your super robot locker of infinite droids.

Like the specialty droids and abilities, these have an inventory cap of 7 each and accumulate over levels either through wheel spins or purchases.

And this features are where the game design begins to falter.

You can probably guess my base complaint as a purist: I think any good level design presents players with a situation where they can always beat the level on skill alone. It may be hard, but you should always start with the tools to do it. If there are special items you can improve with between levels, then, like mario, they should just make it easier or give you access to bonus parts of the level. They should not be neccessary.

By level 30 or so the levels ramp up in difficulty to the point where you MUST use your limited building and droid resources to have a chance to win. Most of these buildings cost $$15 million in game currency. Most of the levels only net you maybe 10 million or so. You see where this is going — one wrong move on a difficult level and you have to go back and beat an easier level a couple of times just to get the resources back to try the harder level again.

As the levels get more difficult the stuff coming at you gets more chaotic as well. Explosives hurled at your character and his robots hurtling all over the place. Sometimes you’re playing great and a single grenade launches you into a pile of enemies and an offensive building and BOOM you’re dead, your $70 million in buildings bought to beat the level are gone, and you are left to either rage quit or pucker up and go grind levels you beat long ago to put yourself in a position to win again.

As a result, I found myself doing something I loathe doing – dialing down the difficulty. If I do this for your game, it means I’m not enjoying challenge that’s been presented to me. Requiring mindless grinding is a good way to get there. And the saddest thing is, there aren’t even in game purchases to justify game designers weighing an otherwise serviceable game down with all that filler.

In the end, I got to level 13-9, of 15. So about 85% of the way or so? 11 levels left. Why not push through you say? Well, I might. But honestly, the difficulty meter doesn’t change much, at this point every level requires me to burn a huge chunk of my inventory of building and specialty units, perfectly commit them and smash through a chaotic space on a 5 minute timer. A single thing going wrong leads to death, and then having to mindlessly play about 15 rounds of earlier levels just to restock. Don’t know about you guys, but not my idea of fun!

I’ll give it a B- : fun looking world, easy to get into and play, with some good game design ideas. The levels are more one-note that they should be and the scarcity mechanic leads to some really frustrating moments and pointless grinding as the difficulty increases.

GGS.

Post Script: After reviewing this and giving up, I ended up continuing to chip away at this game for another few weeks. What kept me? A few things.

1. I found some faster/easier ways to grind out large piles of items, so the expenditure on hard levels wasn’t too taxing
2. There were a decent number of challenges where they gave you a preset group of bots/buildings to use, making them much more interesting than the grind-and-resource-dump challenges that were mixed in between them. These I enjoyed trying to work through with set limited resources

In the end, I raged a lot, burned billions in resources and had to redo the last few matches many many times. But I was close enough that I felt I could finish it, and I kept at it a few attempts per night.

The final map goal said “The Rocket has already landed, escape in 20 minutes”. After dying in rage inducing fashion, burning shitloads of resources 10 or 15 times, I piled my resources mountain so high that I had 70 timer extensions. Meaning I could easily make that 20 minutes 40 if I needed to. I grinded slowly and surely around the map, burning billions in building resources.

I destroyed half the map, reached the rocket launch pad only to find…. no rocket?

Frustrated, I burned a bunch of time resources and set about slowly grinding the other half of the map methodically, until all the buildings and enemies were destroyed. Maybe the goal was listed incorrectly and there was something I had to kill?

Full map cleared, the rocket still hadn’t landed. I had burned billions and billions in items, I had cleared the whole map. I was not doing this shit again. I paused and looked around the internet. There was one bad review for the game, no walkthroughs. Finally, browsing through the steam discussions I found one dedicated user with this to say:

Thanks, little buddy. I let time expire. I win! He reported this 5 years ago and was thanked by staff for it, still the bug remains.

Cute game, fun interface, a few infuriating design choices. Would’ve been better with pure crafted levels with limited resources, I think, as those challenges had to be thought out and made fair and interesting. The rest is kind of a resource slug fest, and the way your die, character bouncing helplessly around the screen into unknown bombs after burning a pile of scarce items, must’ve lead to a lot of smashed keyboards and punched screens when this came out.