Pax East 2011 had a lot of games on display ranging from indie to Triple A but one of them really stood out to me. Demiurge Studios brought their upcoming side-scrolling title called Shoot Many Robots. This was the first time the game was being shown to the public and most gamers in the Demiurge booth had a big smile on their face when they got hands on the game for the first time.
Shoot Many Robots is a 2 stick shooter where players are set up against a load of well, robots – evil robots. Yes, they want to harm you. One of the parts being shown off was from the 4 player co-op adventure where players battled through one of the game’s missions until eventually facing off with the ‘Fatboy’ boss. The other available mode was ‘Survival’ – this game type consists of 6 increasingly difficult waves of robot hordes. Apparently only one team out of the entire PAX attendees managed to beat all six waves. Gamers will be in for a rough but fun ride.
The gameplay itself is pretty straight forward but its simplicity made it super fun and easy to pick up. Shoot Many Robots has players pick a loadout with primary and secondary guns while they’re equipped with a jet pack. There are several different robot types in the game and I got to see a lot of them. The enemy bots ranged from small turrets to mini bosses and giant main robots like the ‘Fatboy’ who sprayed oil over the playing area and lit it on fire. Here players will need to avoid getting killed and hit the weak spots in order to defeat the Fatboy.
Using the jetpacks combined with the different weapon types is a lot of fun and I could have kept playing this demo all Pax long. Demiurge has crafted an incredibly detailed world with so much creativity and nuance to each area and its enemy robots that the experience of going through a level is second to none. Killing robots and progressing through levels will give players points which they can in turn use to buy new weapons and use those throughout the game’s modes and missions.
Shoot Many Robots was shown off on the Xbox 360 and no release date was given to us but I was told that we can expect the game to out at some point in 2011 and that it would be available on many ‘different’ downloadable platforms.
