Robots at Midnight Review – Short but Surprisingly Satisfying

Robots at Midnight Review
I play a lot of Soulslike and action RPGs, and quite often they are sprawling games, with epic narratives and dense mechanics. As a consumer, that’s awesome, because I’m getting a lot of game for my money. But in reviewer mode and under a deadline, it often means mainlining the story and hoping my chops are equal to the bosses, because I don’t have the luxury of endless time. Robots at Midnight is great for a reviewer like me, being compact and modestly ambitious. But, as they say, length — or lack thereof — isn’t everything.

Pipe Dreams
Robots at Midnight is now arriving on the PS5, after having spent a month or two on PC and Xbox. We’ll call it a Soulslike, as it checks most of the genre’s boxes: healing bonfires (literally), light and heavy attacks, dodges and parries, and stamina management. There’s no stat-boosting skill tree, with upgrades to weapons and gear taking its place. Realistically, how many skills could be pumped into a character in five hours?

In addition to a range of melee weapons that are essentially repurposed junkyard scraps most of the time, you have an upgradable gauntlet called a MITT that checks the ranged weapon box. It has various force-push-and-pull abilities and becomes critical for crowd control. You also have a little robotic drone that comes online a little later in the game.

As Soulslikes go, there are lots of low-level enemies that can be farmed for scraps, elite field enemies, and bosses. The bosses are the highlight of Robots at Midnight. By and large, they’re pretty challenging, play fair, and have reasonable patterns to learn. My favorite was a robotic baseball pitcher with a literally explosive fastball and AOE loogies. Coming off the sometimes infuriating bosses of Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, the bosses in Robots at Midnight were more fun than frustrating.

Daddy Issues
Robot at Midnight’s narrative is functional if not especially original. You play as a young girl named Zoe, living on a space station with her father and other humans. Zoe’s home is attacked and destroyed by robots — the killer kind, not the definitely helpful ones in our near future — and her father is taken. Zoe escapes to the planet below to search for her dad.

The oddly Earth-like planet is called Yob, and there’s been a robot apocalypse, replacing humans with robots of various kinds. Some are NPCs and helpful quest-givers, but most are hostile to Zoe. The narrative is sketched through NPC dialogue and bits of environmental detritus. The game’s title comes from the planet’s change into night, when more dangerous enemies emerge.

There are some original boss arenas, like a decrepit trailer park or abandoned baseball stadium, but the world mostly feels pretty empty. A lot of the interiors are very plain. The art style goes for a retro future vibe, and I appreciated the vibrant color palette. The grass and much of the Yob’s landscape is a gauzy wash that became a bit visually fatiguing over time. The game’s musical score is like the world. It’s best defined as “synth noodling.” It never coalesces into melody or emotion, repetitive enough that I turned it off entirely.

Limitations May Apply
Robots and Midnight doesn’t include much in the way of environmental puzzles, but there’s a bit of floaty platforming that lacks precision. There are a fair number of NPC quest givers, but their tasks are pretty mundane. The highlight of the game is definitely the combat.  It surprised me by feeling generally impactful and satisfying, at least in the short term. And of course, “the short term” is Robots at Midnight in a nutshell.

Robot at Midnight is only a handful of hours long. There isn’t a ton of replay value thanks to its limited systems, weapons, and enemies. The combat and bosses are undeniably fun, but I kept wishing the mechanics had a little more depth, and the world had more detail. At around $20, the balance between content and price might be, unfortunately, up for debate for many gamers.

***PS5 code provided by the publisher for review***

The Good

Enjoyable combat
Fun bosses
Engaging NPCs

68

The Bad

Very short
Systems lack depth
Empty environments
No replay value