Game Reviews

The Bot Squad: Puzzle Battles

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The Bot Squad: Puzzle Battles

The main problem with The Bot Squad is that it's boring. We've seen everything it does before done better. It's got tower defence elements, tower offence elements, and all of them feel small and jaded.

Then there's some free to play elements, currencies, an energy system, robots telling you to buy things. It's basically the sort of game the App Store sometimes feels like it's choked with.

Sure, it's all shiny and neatly put together, and it makes you collect stars to show how good you are at it, but we've all done that a million times, and we've all done it with smiles instead of apathy etched onto our faces.

Botch squad

The Bot Squad of the title is a collection of robots you have at your disposal. Some punch other robots, some get punched by towers, and others are inanimate objects that block pathways.

Sometimes you need to snaffle a chunk of your opponent's core, other times you need to make sure they don't get to yours. The levels are small, the choices are minimal, and everything plays out while you have a bit of a snooze.

There's still a lot of trial and error though, especially in the tower defence sections. And every time you need to tweak your setup and retry, you have to spend another lump of your energy.

And when it boils down to it, what little input you do have in those sections is so bland that it's hardly worth playing through them again.

The attack levels play a little better, and there's some light puzzling in figuring out which way to go, but there's no real sense of triumph when you get to the end.

The whole thing just feels like a by-the-numbers iOS game. There's no spark, no flair, and nothing that sets it apart from the raft of other titles that wash up on the App Store every week.

The Bot Squad: Puzzle Battles

A jumble of ideas that don't work very well together or apart, this is one to avoid
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.