Droid Assault slots itself exactly between fast-paced action and careful planning, which is to say it sits exactly between those two things and doesn’t do either very well. Its top-down shooting mechanics feel like the perfect fit for a quick and dirty bloodbath à la Hotline Miami, but every enemy moves and shoots at a snail’s pace, and most of the playable robots are more or less the same.
The game’s particular innovation is that collected ‘transfer points’ can be used to control enemies and add them to your group of slow-moving, AI-controlled bots, which you can then switch between with the press of a button. A level ends when all the enemies are defeated or ‘assimilated’, and if I’m being honest the idea of spreading your influence between enemies one by one until you control most of the arena is the most fun I had in this game.
You’ll note that I said I liked the ‘idea’ of this, because in practice it’s not actually something you do in the game. The ‘assimilation’ control is largely worthless as anything but a way to functionally replenish your health by replacing your old body with a new one with more HP. The AI-controlled companions seem to do nothing but loiter around, occasionally engaging an enemy they stumble upon, but usually just hanging around the spawn point of each level waiting for you to die and need to take one of them out as your new player.
Honestly, I kind of wanted to like this one. There’s an idea here, buried beneath a thick crust of bland enemy design, bullet sponges that don’t actually pose a meaningful challenge, and general half-baked concepts of mechanical and aesthetic design. If potential fuelled anything other than conversations then Droid Assault would be tearing past the indie competition, but it’s unfortunately more akin to the archaic arcade crawls of the ‘80s.
Dylan's Morsels 