Space Robinson

Review

Your name is Ethan and you’re an engineer and employee of the Vast Corporation. One drilling module in the Colony 21 needs repairing and the Vast Corporation is sending you there to fix it. As you are about to land on Colony 21, your spaceship’s main computer malfunctions and instead of landing like a leaf on the ground, your vessel crashes onto the planet.  Luckily, you survive the impact. You might have dodged the bullet once, but you’ll quickly find out that Colony 21 is infested by aliens; it’s going to be a humungous task to stay alive, let me tell you. Good luck in Space Robinson.  

Space Robinson is a top-down/rogue lite action game developed by Luxorix Games and published by Alawar Premium on the 8 of October 2019 on Steam.

After completing a small tutorial, you’ll gain access to the main base. The base has several rooms, including two medical bays with three machines to repair, three animal paddocks (pig, dog and raccoon), a botanical garden, a maintenance room (wrench symbol) and another two. All rooms, with the exception of the botanical garden and the paddocks, will have machines to fix and you’ll need to find a specific artefact during your next gameplay to repair each one of them (check out the clues on the machine). When you manage to do so, you’ll be rewarded with permanent upgrades. In one of the rooms, you’ll find a green cylinder. This will allow you to change the level of difficulty for your next playthrough. When you’re ready, go to the room with the teleporter and prepare to die!

The gameplay is simply superb. Ethan will carry a gun and a wrench as his main weapons at the start of the game. Depending in which level of difficulty you have decided to play, Ethan’s hair will be either red or green. Red is normal difficulty while green is easier. Regardless, you’ll die a lot! In each level, you’ll find crates; the blue ones will give you ammunition, the red ones a new weapon, and the purple ones will give you a large number of crystals which you’ll need in order to power your base. Each location has three levels.  For the first two, you’ll need to find your way to the teleporter and eliminate as many aliens as you can. There is also a mini boss to clear in each of these levels. You’ll find a terminal which has three perks to choose from.  As you can only pick up one of the three, make sure you read what the perks do (this could prove slightly difficult if you’re being attacked left, right and centre - I died a few times while checking the perks!). Anyway, each perk you manage to pick up, you’ll carry with you to the next level, and so on and so forth until you die.  The third level is slightly bigger, and you’ll have to face off three waves of enemies while the teleporter recharges before you can use it.

I really like the fact that is that there is a day/night cycle.  During the day, you’ll face a set number of enemies, and at night, spooky new aliens will come out in mass to kill you. It will probably take you around 4 to 7 minutes per level to clear them. Personally, I only managed to clear 6 levels (2 locations) in my playthrough and died an awful lot!.

Great pixel artwork and the game runs extremely well; the soundtrack is really good, too.  The game is currently available in three languages (English, Russian and Chinese) and has all the generic settings such as audio, gameplay and video available to change if needs be. You’ll be frustrated more than once, even if you decide to colour Ethan’s hair green (easier level of difficulty). You’ll be cursing quite a bit!