Robosaurus is, in fact, an actual robot that shoots fire and can crush cars with ease, and it’s a great shame that a developer has taken this robot and not done it justice. You can’t pick up cars or shoot fire, you can only play through 3 different modes all of which sport terribly ugly graphics, and some of the worst gameplay that we’ve experienced on an iPhone yet.
Land mode effectively places Robosaurus on the left of the screen, and instead of using its flame breath or crushing claws it attaches a rocket launcher onto the robot so that you can fire rockets at the various enemies that try and take you out. You replenish your ammunition and gas by shooting pick-ups that are dropped from enemy vehicles. Wouldn’t shooting them blow them up? Anyway, doing this effectively eventually triggers a boss but you are such a large target that it can be difficult to get through. This mode feels the most complete but it’s still substandard compared to many of the games available on the Store.
Air mode puts you in the cockpit with a gun that sports three different types of ammunition; another addon that doesn’t appear in the real-life version of Robosaurus. You tap each of the three buttons along the bottom to fire the corresponding bullet and your stock can be replenished by running into those same coloured blobs that are dropped from blimps. What is annoying though is when you run out of ammunition for a gun you can’t fire it again; it should just be one gun ideally and then they could have made the fire button bigger. Also, the mode doesn’t end when you completely run out of ammunition and so it feels rushed out as a result.
The final mode, Crush, is the most broken. We couldn’t get the controls to work at all; you have to throw cars of various weights at different obstacles in order to smash them, but it just doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do.
In Conclusion
Robosaurus is not a game you should consider getting for your iPhone; it feels rushed out without any attention paid to good interface design (i.e. getting you to tap a particular element on the screen to continue instead of simply tapping any area of the screen) or for that matter graphic design. Games like this clog up the App Store needlessly and instead of contributing to a rich ecosystem they take attention away from what’s really worth playing.
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