Bionic Dues

I like this game. I've won on normal and lost a few times on expert. If you're like me, on a challenging difficulty there is one initial decision and two repeating decisions you'll be making in this game. First you'll be deciding the upgrade track for your bots. Because it's a pain in the butt to try to do a complete parts-out respec mid-game. Then, it's: Do I go for a mission that that I need to wipe all enemies or a mission that I just need to survive? If I went survival, when do I engage and when do I evade? Apart from those decisions the actual tactics are both obvious and determined by your bot specs. Once you figure out the weapons and specials your bots have, it's usually a matter of whether you have the stats to make it through the level or not. Getting there can be pretty tense, though, as you sneak through a door and find a room packed with bots. Or you try to whittle down a oncoming stream of bots and it's a toss up if they'll get in range before you wear them down. Final 'defense mission' is a little weird, since it's a normal base-clearing mission instead of actually defending against advancing robots, but that's a minor nitpick. Bottom line: I started playing in the evening, looked up, and saw daylight.

I purchased the game when it was released at full price. I did'nt regret it. At a reduced price it is a very good deal if you like tactcal combat. The mix of tactical combat and tense exploration in confined areas works very well. Playing in ironmode with no reload is really exciting and challenging. After each mission you get some loots to upgrade your robots. There are plenty of options to upgrade your bots and make a team that suit your playing style. Most items add +/- to many different stats, and it is sometime a bit tedious to find the best set to equip your team. Although the game does a good job of immediately highlighting the + and - with green and red. The technical execution and gfx are nothing special, but does the job. The main game strength being the tactical gameplay.

The Good: This is a game where you can pause and ponder any moment, and you should, because it needs careful tactics. It has a casual simplicity and yet there are enough options to make it interesting. You can save at any moment. Also, there is a certain tongue-in-the-cheek tone in all the equipment descriptions that I like. replayability is good: take a different set of exos (player robots) and a different leader and you will get a slightly different feel. The player robots remind me of RPG stereotypes: the fighter, rogue, wizard and barbarian robots (no healers, though). The bad: Bionic Dues, the title is just too lame; probably all the good ones were taken? Also, the battle maps: a mission in the sewers and a mission in an office building look...both like the inside of a dark hangar. How difficult can it be to make like, the background for sewers green and change the cover objects for the office building from machine parts to say, filing cabinets and water coolers? What little feeling there is of storyline is lost because missions may play a little different, and give different loot, but FEEL very much all the same (except, a bit, the assassination mission where there are electric floors no other mission has). If they had given more thought to the battle maps, I would have given this 5 stars, as I keep replaying this anyway.

I've been playing this for a few weeks and am having a great time. There's a ton of loot with plenty of room for experimentation. It's great fun. What I like the best is that they took the time to dress up the genre a bit (I understand ascii, but this is lot more fun). The music is very good and the "theme" sounds like the soundtrack of a cheesy anime and that's a FABULOUS thing. The wisecracking robots are still enjoyable to me. I've played it for about 15 hrs and occasionally I hear a new quip from the evil robots and it always makes me laugh. The games can get a bit long but I'm pretty terrible anyway so it's not a factor to me anyway. Worth your time and a great price. Arcen rules.

A little short on documentation, but once you've played for a while everything works itself out. The upgrade system took a while to figure out, even movement and character selection took a few runs to get down, but it's definitely worth taking the time to muddle through. Definitely a game worth picking up, just a shame it didn't show up here until I'd already bought it on Steam.