For my money, it's hard to go wrong with robots. They're big, they look awesome and if you put together five of them shaped like cats you get Voltron. It's a win-win, people. So, I was of course excited to play Mr. Robot, from Moonpod games; it has "robot" right in the title. I'm happy to say the game does not disappoint.

Mr. Robot is a quirky blend of genres, a little bit 3D platformer, a little bit puzzle solving and a little bit RPG. The game follows the adventures of Asimov the robot (the first of many sly sci-fi references snuck into the game). Asimov (his number is 1138, geek reference #2) and his robot friends are part of the crew of the Eidolon (geek reference #3). The Eidolon is transferring human researchers to Prime, an earth-class planet. The humans have been in cryo sleep for decades as the robots work to keep the ship running and the humans alive. All of this is being overseen by the ship's functioning A.I., HEL-9000 (geek reference #4).

The gamer picks things up when, surprise, something has gone wrong on the ship. Robots have been activated early and the lead A.I. is behaving oddly. I can't get too far into things without bringing up massive spoilers, but suffice it to say you'll be battling a mad computer A.I. and attempting to bypass his lockdowns, which will involve trying to save your buddies and the humans who are transporting you. Classic 2001: A Space Odyssey kind of stuff.

Right off the bat, gamers are sure to notice that Mr. Robot looks great. The robots and environments are all nicely detailed and rendered. The lighting is spot on, with some nice moody glow to the environments. The other thing the gamer is bound to notice right away is that the mouse control for the game is a pretty poor choice. Use the keyboard, you'll be much happier.

Mouse control is, in theory, more precise than keyboard control, but that's only when you have a full range of movement available to you. As Mr. Robot is isometric and deals with grid-based movement and puzzles, the mouse is killer. It's hard to stop on a dime with mouse movement, and that's precisely what the platform jumping of Mr. Robot demands. It also doesn't help that the cursor on screen showing mouse movement stops a couple of grid spaces away from Asimov, making your movements feel clipped and restricted, even though the cursor is only there to indicate your direction, it ends up feeling like you can't move as much as you'd like to.

Keyboard control is much easier to work with, but even with the way keyboard movement lends itself to grid-based games, Mr. Robot can be difficult to control. As an isometric platformer, Mr. Robot will be constantly presenting the gamer with a perspective that is far from optimal for depth perception. It's not difficult to get the hang of jumping in the game, or to gauge your maximum jumping distance, but fairly regularly elements of the levels themselves will obscure exactly where you want to be landing or just how far away a platform us. So, while this isn't a specific fault for Mr. Robot, isometric platformers will forever make gamers attempt diagonal jumps and they will forever be frustrating.

Many of the puzzles in the game deal with crate arrangement to build pathways through a room, or to block off certain types of robots or to activate certain switches. The puzzles feel organic and are never massive stumpers, taking just the right amount of thought to be challenging, but not frustrating. For the gamer that gets stuck, though, there's a quick and easy "Reset Room" option. One of the biggest prizes during all the puzzling is energon, bits of energy that are scattered throughout the ship and can be used to either replenish Asimov's health, stock up energy to gain extra lives (this is automatically done if Asimov has fewer than three lives), or to be stored as cash (automatically done if health and lives are full). Collection of items like this is tracked in the gamer's profile and helps to earn them points and trophies, which can be displayed on the game's live leaderboard.

The other major prize to collect is items to equip your robots with for RPG combat. When the gamer needs to hack into a machine or into a robot, they enter the RPG portion of the game. Using ghost hacking robots (which are mirrors of the robots you normally have in your party, just blue) the gamer traverses a sort of maze setup inside the target computer. They move from communication node to communication node to GPU units to RAM units and so on. Each unit they stop at may contain a series of enemy units that will attack with ICE (geek reference #5) or HIT programs. Combat is totally turn based and proceeds much like any standard RPG combat. Gamers equip items and use programs to cast "spells" on enemy and friendly units. Experience is awarded based on how active each ghost was in combat. Once the critical computer node has been cleaned of enemies, the level will be complete and the gamer pulled out of the hacking mode and back into the world of platforming.

The RPG mode is a nice addition and gives the game extra legs, but much of the management menus for the RPG mode are clunky and difficult to navigate. It took me forever to figure out how to apply permanent upgrades to my robots (from the Info screen, by the way). When attempting to pick a program in combat, you must scroll one at a time down through the list. Using the right arrow to jump over to another column doesn't work, you need to click one at a time through. The store has a similar feel to it. Purchasing items requires jumping back and forth to several different sections. It's not a deal-breaker, not by a long-shot, but it wouldn't have taken too much work to clean up the interfaces in these sections and make all aspects of the game really seamless. Equipping items is easy, but in some cases I was never really able to use the items to their full potential. The entire game, I only found one shield upgrade item, despite my having nearly all my ghosts equipped with shields able to hold two or more upgrade slots… and I'm pretty sure I wasn't doing that poor of a job exploring things.

Overall, though, Mr. Robot is a fun title with great production value. There are two types of gaming to grab you, a solid story filled with revelations and references. The game isn't particularly lengthy, but it has tons of challenges and secrets hidden throughout. The ability to track your progress via high scores and to play through the game a second time on a harder difficulty level give a good level of replay value.

Graphics:
The lighting looks great, the environments have a rich and polished look to them and all the effects are quality. The game simply looks great, I expect this kind of look from an A-List developer.

Sound:
The music in the game is as well done as the graphics, well-recorded and polished. It never sounds amateur or overly repetitive. The effects in the game aren't overly numerous, but all are well done.

Gameplay:
Mr. Robot gives the gamer a lot to do, but controls, the viewpoint and the interface bogs the game down a bit. None of it is enough to turn off the gamer, but they're all items that could have been improved upon for a tighter overall feel to the game.

Concept:
The story to the game is solid, and held my interest. It would have been nice to see a more cinematic kind of denouement to the whole thing, but the way the credits are read off at the end more than made up for it all. Most fun I've ever had reading credits in a game, hands down. The combination of a good story with RPG and platforming and puzzling elements makes Mr. Robot a fresh title.

Value:
Mr. Robot comes with a level editor for the creation of user scenarios (I couldn't find any evidence of any existing currently… and this may be because when I launched the editor, I couldn't figure out how to quit out of it and had to kill the process via Windows) and has a lot of secrets and awards to win, plus two difficulty modes and the leaderboard. All in all, a lot of game for the buck, though the main adventure itself is somewhat short.

Overall:
Mr. Robot brings a lot of great things to the table. It's polished and fun to play and has a lot to offer the gamer. Pick it up.