Shooty Shooty Robot Invasion brings silly and outlandish and the kind of experience where you know the creator of the game has thrown caution to the wind and decided just to put some thing out there that they know they’ll enjoy playing and just hope that you feel the same. It’s light touch daft drama. A robot invasion is here, and as the character Shooty, you have to dash around levels with your gun or guns, blast robots and engage in dialogue with a supporting cast of flat one dimension characters who are only really one dimensional in looks but are spitting out dialogue lines like they are a some kind of straight to DVD movie.
There’s something to be said for hand drawn graphics, which aren’t really perfect but do a great job of filling the game with character. there’s the expected repetition of assets as you traverse around the various levels, and you will be traversing as a lot of the time your be parkouring up walls and buildings, jumping across gaps and trying to reach different objectives. SSRI has fetch quests as well as it has bullets, so often you’ll be tasked with finding something that a character needs, a without any kind of map this can occasionally result in a feel of aimlessly running about, but the side stuff never really is anything more than being in the right place.
The main mechanic of shooting is imply a case of holding down the trigger and blasting away at your robot overlord enemies, the aiming sometimes feels off and there’s no auto aim, and so you can often feel like your just shooting and hoping for the best as the robots charge towards you guns blazing. It’s not always clear that you’ve been hit due to very gentle damage feedback. It is something that you’ll get used to over time. Though SSRI doesn’t promise to hang around any longer than about 12 hours of gameplay, so your experience in run around in the world and various levels is going to be something relatively short lived.
It works fine on Steamdeck, though I normally run most game through the Lossless Scaling plugin to cut down on obvious frame rate issues. Once you’re in the middle of a game, you’ll barely notice any issues due to the intensity of what is going on. The hand drawn graphics make you expect that the game won’t run that smoothly, because everything is falling apart as the characters around you chat endlessly about their lives as the invasion takes place. There’s so much dialogue, it is tricky to believe that this was all put together by one person, there’s a hello of a lot of writing here, that funnily enough, didn’t really need to be here at all. You can just tell this is some kind of passion project going on. 
Plain speak? Shooty Shoot Robot invasion isn’t approaching masterpiece or Game of the Year material. It is however, just ridiculous amount of fun. In the purest sense of the word. Run around and shoot things. I’m reminded a lot of Boltgun for some reason, the recent delight from Auroch digital. You don’t really care what is going on as you traverse the terrain. I’m also very slightly reminded of Jet Set Radio as well. It’s all good. It’s low level vapidity and ridiculousness with hand drawn graphics that while simple must have taken ages to get to the screen. The dialogue is silly with characters who curse and swear and sometime have you rolling your eyes, but you chuckle because of the cheese. It’s the type of game that you play when you don’t really care what you want to play, you just want to tune out and let all the thumbs do the talking. Silly Game for a silly time and somehow through all the nonsense, you’ll end up grinning because sometimes, life is too short and playing something that is there for fun is the tonic that you need.
You can Buy Shooty Shooty Robot Invasion on Steam https://store.steampowered.com/app/3763820/Shooty_Shooty_Robot_Invasion/
This review is based on the retail version of the game provided to us by the designer and publisher. We were not paid monetary compensation for this review. We give a general overview of the gameplay and so not all of the mechanical aspects of the game may be mentioned. Videogames are strange because the act of playing them will often cement if you want to keep playing them further. So we normally give a video game the benefit of the doubt and keep playing until we get an idea of what the game offers. Some games will not require a huge written piece to describe what they do and how they made us feel about them. We understand that behind every game is someone who has dedicated time, effort and money and so we'll often tell you about things that didn't gel with us instead of trashing someone's hard work. We hope this write up gives you an idea of whether or not this game is something that you will consider playing or even add to your collection. Even if we don't like something, hopefully it helps you to decide if it is something that you should find out more about. We always suggest you check out a gameplay video to give you a better understanding of the game as it is played. If you would like to support more content on the blog then please consider backing us on Patreon. www.patreon.com/werenotwizards
