It dices! It slices! It cauterizes! I honestly haven’t had this much fun with a melee system since Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy let you chop your foes into little pieces simply by touching them with the blade of your lightsaber. (You didn’t even have to attack them. All you had to do was position your blade so it touched them.) At long last, we have another game built around the same kind of idea: Clone Drone in the Danger Zone
In this game, players take on the role of a human mind transferred to a robot body armed with an energy sword, and made to fight against ‘real’ robots – either in the 5 chapter campaign, single-player arena, or multiplayer. Lighthearted, funny, and using comic voxel-style graphics, this game really is a perfect example of the fact that if you make something that’s fun, it doesn’t have to be complicated in order to keep players entertained for literally hours. Your sword, for example, only has three attacks: an overhead chop, and two horizontal swipes (the direction of the swipe determined by which movement key you’re pressing). Blocking is also straight forward – if one blade intercepts another during an attack, it blocks it.
This would perhaps be too simplistic if not for the fact that at the core of it all is a highly visceral simulation, where what damage you do depends entirely on where you hit, and how deeply. All robots (yourself included) are only ever defeated when they suffer damage which leaves them unable to fight. So swinging the tip of your sword across the torso of an enemy robot will leave a glowing furrow and take a chunk out of it, but otherwise leave it perfectly combat-ready (as will an energy arrow through the chest). Likewise, a blow which takes out both legs will incapacitate your foe, but a slice which only takes out one will leave your opponent (or you) comically hopping after the enemy. This deceptively simple design leads to incredibly tense and satisfying fights. Each clash – even with the lowliest Sword Bot – could be your last, and every time you launch an attack, you risk opening yourself up to a lethal blow. It’s also more than just cosmetic, as a damaged leg means no more kicking, and some bigger foes will need to be literally chopped down to size before a killing blow can be dealt. This is classic skilled based gameplay: easy to grasp and execute, difficult to master, but oh so satisfying when you do (nothing beats darting into a pack of foes and taking three or four of them out in one go, or darting just out of range of a lethal hammer blow and taking the head off your opponent).
Throw in a decent number of upgrades – jetpacks, kicks, different weapons, flaming weapons, the ability to deflect projectiles, to name a few – and a slew of different enemy types, and you have a game that can and will keep you happily amused for hours. In large part this is thanks to the (often trap-laden) arenas. This includes an endless mode, challenge mode (such as defeating enemies using only the lowly kick ability), streaming Twitch mode (where viewers can vote to make the player’s life easier or more difficult), and multiplayer. Each time you complete a combat arena, you have a chance to repair and upgrade your bot, adding new abilities, different weapons, or creating backup clones, should the one you’re using unfortunately gets crushed. (You also get to hear the often hilarious banter from the two commentator bots.)
In terms of the campaign, this is made up of five chapters, telling the story of humans who have been ‘harvested’ and their minds put inside robot bodies, and their fight to escape and save the rest of humanity. Essentially a series of arenas strung together, just how long it takes you really depends on how skilled you’ve already become. If you’ve already put in hours in the arena mode, then you probably will blitz through the campaign in under two hours. It also keeps things fresh by throwing new things at you, including a system which lets you take over the body of the robot which destroyed you (not only acting as a limited pool of ‘extra lives’ but a tactical option: do you attempt to destroy that huge Mark 3 Hammer bot, or deliberately let it crush you?) and a highly entertaining space-combat section which takes advantage of the game’s technology to let you slice apart enemy ships using lasers.
With its brilliant combat system, and highly entertaining arenas, it’s more than worth the low entry price. If you enjoy fast paced, visceral, and above all fun combat, then these are the drones you’ve been looking for. ■