ROBOBEAT Review — Deadly Remix

“Shoot to the beat” is the tagline of ROBOBEAT, and it’s no misnomer. This flashy roguelike will challenge your sense of rhythm, throwing randomized levels of neon villains and psychedelic visuals at you, with your only true weapon being the song playing on your cassette tape and your ability to keep a tune.

ROBOBEAT sees you playing as Ace, a world-famous bounty hunter with a supreme sense of style tracking your latest target, a robot villain named Frazzler with a flair for the dramatic and some villainous intent. A deeper story is explained through cutscenes and presumed flashbacks, all of which are super engaging, but I’ll be honest and say I had some trouble following along.

Something you cannot say about ROBOBEAT is that it provides clear direction or information at face value. Be it its story, which can feel as psychedelically weird in its presentation as a Pink Floyd music video, or its tutorial, which sometimes felt jank and awkwardly put together. By awkwardly put together, I meant you’d be walking down a hall seconds after being presented with some new mechanic, then immediately hit a load screen and be put somewhere else. It was weird, for sure, and it didn’t feel the most informative. If not for the game’s straightforward simplicity, I would have found myself lost as to what to do after fumbling my way through the introduction.

But ROBOBEAT’s issue with presenting information gets a pass in that straightforward simplicity. The game knows it doesn’t need to hold your hand; it’s a rhythm game, straightforward and simple.

To begin a level, you pop a cassette of your choice in your Walkman and proceed down a pretty obviously laid-out path. As enemies begin to appear, you simply click one of two mouse buttons in time with the beat to slay them and keep moving forward. Any mechanics with more complexity than what was obvious are easily learned by using them against your enemies, so there is never a point where you’ll feel like you weren’t given enough information to do what you need to do in ROBOBEAT.

As I said before, ROBOBEAT is a roguelike built around a rhythm game mechanic. You proceed through randomly generated halls, unlocking new weapons and buffs as you push forward.

This is sort of where I wish the game presented its information a little better. There is a pretty good assortment of buffs and weapons to be found, and you can read what each one does when you interact with it. Unfortunately, the game’s text font is really awkward, and when paired with the screen’s visual effect, it makes trying to read these descriptions, frankly, a pain in the ass. I may have especially suffered here because I do have pretty bad eyesight, but at a point, I stopped trying to decipher what I was picking up. I just accepted when my lack of strategy inevitably led to my death.

Luckily, the guns you choose don’t feel nearly as important as the music you play.

Being a rhythm game, you, of course, are expected to keep a beat. Shooting in time with your song makes your shots more powerful, helps pierce armor, reduces cooldowns, etc. It’s all around the right way to play the game and how you are intended to clear a room, so you can really make any pair of guns work. My personal favorite loadout was dual-wielding two golden revolvers that did crit damage on headshots.

Not only is matching the beat of the song the only real way to do consistent damage, but it just feels satisfying when you clear a level and get a popup telling you how good you were at staying in tune.

In a sense, the song you bring into the game is one of the most important strategic choices you can make. This is not only true because being able to physically memorize the beat of a song helps you do more damage but also because the tempo of a song affects the level, speeding up or slowing down the pace of your shots and the speed of your enemies according to what you’re playing.

The neatest part of ROBOBEAT is the ability to upload your own music to the game. While the game already has a great set of tracks to enjoy, you can include your favorite songs, and the beat editor will allow you to play the game around them. I can only imagine it’s a matter of time before some mad lad does a run to Through the Fire and the Flames by Dragonforce.

Again, if you’re not keen on uploading your own MP3 or WAV files to the game, ROBOBEAT still has its own unique and very head-bobbing set of techno tracks to enjoy killing too.

Beyond the excellent audio, ROBOBEAT has plenty of exceptional visual stimuli to catch your attention. The colors, the filters, and the tone of everything you encounter feel like something between a psychedelic experience and a vision of VR simulations born from 1980s sci-fi. I touched on it briefly before, but outside of the game’s beautifully stylistic levels are cutscenes with a phenomenal energy that mixes the bizarre and the funky. ROBOBEAT has a feeling to sell to you, something that’s hard to explain and definitely worth experiencing on your own.

Try Hard Guides received a PC review code for this game. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles in our Game Reviews page! ROBOBEAT is available on Steam.