A game that might be fun if it weren’t so boring.
When I was a kid my mother would ask me to clean my room. I’d refuse. She’d press harder and I’d still balk at the idea. Her final solution was to turn cleaning my room into a game…pick up all your toys, and put them in this box, and you’ll get a prize. This worked for a little while, until I realized I was still just cleaning my room. And cleaning your room, no matter the high score you might receive for doing so, is boring.
It is telling that this memory is the first thing that sprang to mind while playing BattleNoidz HD on iPad. Your objective is to control a robot from one side of a landscape to another collecting ‘pyramids,’ which you then dump off at your base using a spaceship. The robot pilots the spaceship, I think. This took me a while to figure out. But you can’t use the robot sand the spaceship at the same time and you can only carry four pyramids at a time because apparently you drive a really low-tech spaceship that wasn’t built for towing heavy loads.
And that’s basically it. Oh, sure there are robots chasing you and surface to air guns firing trying to blast you out of the sky, but, all you can do is fire back one laser shot at a time, or hide in your spaceship and try avoid getting shot by flying away. But there are no power-ups; no extra weapons to acquire; and unless it happens in a later level I never reached because I got bored playing, no ‘better’ spaceship. It’s just four pyramids at a time, dump them at the base, and go back for more ‘til you meet your quota. If the game had been named ‘Space Miner’ or ‘Galactic Rockhound’ I could forgive the crushing monotony of playing.
At least the title would imply some kind of blue collar robot working diligently at a Sisyphean task. But the game is called ‘BattleNoidz!’ With a ‘z.’ Where are the explosions? The destruction? The Domino’s Pizza cartoon mascots? It’s a simple game, which might be exactly what you want. But I was expecting something much more, which is why it was a letdown.
But it works. The controls are intuitive and it looks nice on your glossy screen. But the whole time I was playing I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was doing work, not playing a game. That I was hoping for exciting but settling for dull. That I was going to blow up some stuff, but instead just got tricked into cleaning my room.
App Store: $0.99
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