RoboMaze II 

I’ll skip the introductions. No, RoboMaze I never saw public release outside a bundle collection. Yes, this could be a blessing, given the sequel’s quality.

In RoboMaze II, players control a robot under the command of freedom fighters from the Resistance taking down a repressive dictator by battling through his massive tower, complete with an oversized lobby and penthouse. These battles play out in straight-forward run-and-gun fashion with a little platforming mixed in. The setup is ripe for level design potential. Each room uses only a single screen, with 20 areas grouped together to form a level. This lends itself to rapid-fire progression and light puzzle elements. Should you use a key in this room? Or wait for the next floor to see what you can unlock?

Too bad the game is unplayably busted.

On the upside, RoboMaze II includes a functional equipment system. Between levels, you can use money found throughout the game to purchase new limited-use weapons or powerups. Somehow, though, RoboMaze II deteriorates into a glitchy mess long before these stores are available. It’s difficult to describe where the game manages to do wrong, but a simple rundown might do the trick.

Collisions are too sensitive. Characters and objects interact at the pixel, which doesn’t work with a rough, jagged art style. The rooms in the tower are cleverly and realistically decorated, but climbing over rounded objects quickly becomes a nuisance. Sometimes moving platforms will be impossible to walk onto because they stop a few beats too short of ground level, and passageways as tall as your character prove impossible to jump into. Forget about getting into one of those hallways from a moving platform.

The controls are unusable. RoboMaze II has support for both keyboards and joysticks, but the keyboard movement feels poorly hashed-together afterthought. The game uses separate buttons to stop and start your movement in each direction. Additionally – and this might be the worst part about the entire game – touching any wall will stop you in your tracks. If you’re jumping across a gap and tap the ceiling, you’ll plunge to your doom. Heading up stairs? Be prepared to restart every time you hit one. If you’re hugging a wall and need to hop to a platform above, you’ll have to press the keyboard at the exact right moment. Moving too early or late will, once again, freeze you in place and send you sinking like a paperweight.

If you die, you go back to the nearest checkpoint. These usually come every five rooms. That’s a forgiving frequency, but all too often, a batch of levels will contain a bottomless pit platform puzzle, which is (as we’ve established) really difficult. Death means having to slog back through the last few levels to reach it again and fall because of a glitch or physics quirk. Such is the case in the first set of levels; I have rarely if ever made it past the fifth room. Repeat this process again for all 100 rooms per volume. That’s 300 areas total in all three episodes: 60 sets of repetitive level grinding rendered impossible because you might accidentally touch the wall.

You can imagine that this becomes frustrating.

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Tags: 1991, 90s, CGA, DOS, EGA, glitchy, MVP Software, RoboMaze, sequel, side-scroller, video, Wetware

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