Back in the early 90s, publishers like Sierra, Apogee, and so on had to make due with pretty limited technology by today’s standards. While nonetheless cutting edge at the time, they sometimes found it best to go for bright, colorful family-friendly sprites and game themes. Battle Bugs and The Incredible Machine were two examples of this, and today Puzzle Bots is trying to mimic the feel of such games. While it’s a PC game, it’s one you can easily play with just the mouse and that’s a good thing since it’s clearly meant for kids and their parents to play together.
Puzzle Bots gives you control of five tiny robots, each with one ability: One can pick up items (and use them on other things), another can push/pull objects, a third is able to move underwater, while the other two have a flamethrower and bombs... and yes, it’s family-friendly despite that. Since each robot is about the size of your thumb, the world around them is a very complex place; a foot long gap is no big deal to a human, but these bots will have to do things like push a book into place to serve as a bridge, repair a toy boat to sail along a tiny stream, and so on. The first several puzzles are essentially tutorials, showing you how each robot works and then putting them in a ’real’ level to figure out a problem, adding a new member to the team every few stages.
These early puzzles are pretty simple, and even children with basic reading skills should figure them out quickly. Later puzzles get more complex, though the game does offer hints as you go and there is no way to truly lose or fail a stage so it’s really a matter of how long each stage takes to complete rather than if you can do it or not. There are a few puzzles later on that require you to look around very closely for objects, and one or two close to the end it took me a while to figure it out due to bizarre leaps of logic, but for the most part it’s a pretty intuitive game.
A campy storyline accompanies these puzzles, mostly revolving around the human inventors interacting with each other and being unaware just how clever their robots are. Much of this story has spoken dialogue, and while the voice acting is cheesy it’s easily forgiven since Puzzle Bots is a budget title. The story is in any case pretty light, playful fare that families can enjoy together.
Visually speaking, Puzzle Bots is obsolete out of the gate. If you’re used to today’s sharp 3D models that look life-like or extremely detailed sprites, Puzzle Bots isn’t about that; it sprinkles in a few nods to older DOS games and makes very clear it wants to look like those titles. The same could be said of the basic sound effects and the catchy yet repetitive soundtrack; they’re meant to hail back to a simpler time. If you’re willing to accept that, then Puzzle Bots looks and sounds pretty good for what it is.
While generally cute, fun, and well suited to parents and kids playing the game side by side, Puzzle Bots does have a few flaws worth noting. The most severe of these has already been mentioned, that a small number of puzzles near the end make strange jumps of logic that I don’t think a child will get in any reasonable length of time... they may end up trying the ’click everything on everything’ approach though thankfully such puzzles are rare. Less troublesome is that there are a few times where the game clearly knows what you’re trying to do (and even says as much), but insists that you do the steps in a different order; combining one object with another may result in a robot telling you that’s the correct solution but needs to be done the other way around. It’s annoying more than genuinely bad, though.
Puzzle Bots apparently set out to evoke a "90s DOS family-friendly game" motif, and it succeeds. If you have kids and want a fun way to spend a couple evenings with them (but admittedly just a couple; Puzzle Bots can be completed in just a few hours), this would be a pretty good choice. Its $10 price is fair for what you get, and while it won’t appeal to adult ’core gamers’ playing alone, it definitely hits the mark for its target audience.
Links: Wadjet Eye Games Website - Puzzle Bots (Includes link to purchase/download the game)
Temporary Discount: During PAX 10 (e.g. until September 6, 2010), Puzzle Bots is $5 instead of the usual $10 price. Use the coupon code PUZZLEPAX
