Many people will immediately notice that everything about A Robot Named Fight, from the graphics, the gameplay, and the music, all have that unmistakable resemblance to Super Metroid, but aside from that, this is a very different kind of game. The environments are semi-randomly generated and the game can be beaten in an hour. There are also no saves, and you only have one life. Yes, it’s one of those. It doesn’t really seem so bad at first though. I was able to finish the game three times without dying once.

Unfortunately, you need to win six times to finally unlock the real final level and boss, and the game starts getting much more difficult after each few victories. After my initial winning streak, the fourth run suddenly took me four or five tries to complete. Things get pretty vicious in those last few runs, with greater numbers of enemies who do greater amounts of damage, and a map that grows in complexity and hazard frequency. You’ll need literal balls of steel to finally reach and defeat the dreaded Megabeast core.

As with many roguelites, there’s also some luck involved. Runs can succeed or fail depending on what items have decided to generate each time. I had a few times where I found almost no health increase items and sometimes all the wrong special currency items appeared, leaving me unable to buy enough merchant upgrades to be helpful. It’s all perfectly do-able though if you exercise some caution and make sure to make good use of health restore farming when needed, and the runs are short enough that the frustration of losing isn’t unbearable.

As nice as the idea is of a Metroid-ish world full of nasty bio-horrors is, this game has a pretty short shelf life for a roguelite though. The random generation seems somewhat limited and room types are repeated pretty often. The boss pool is pretty small, and while the bosses have nice visual design, most of them have very basic attack patterns, and so none of them, except the Megabeast itself, are particularly memorable battles. Serviceable, sure, but not memorable.

There aren’t any alternate characters, and there’s not much there in the way of unlocks. Basically, once you’ve done your six full runs and beaten the Megabeast core, that’s it, you’re done. This is a very low-priced game though, so it’s actually not a bad amount of content at all for its price at all. Just don’t be expecting something on the level of Binding of Isaac in terms of replayability. Otherwise, it’s a pretty solid game for fans of Metroidvanias and roguelites. 

A Robot Named Fight is available now digitally for Windows.

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