Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Roboquest
84 Plays2 years ago
Join Dave and Jake as newly awakened robots with guns in this week's episode about a delightfully excellent rogue-like FPS!
MINOR SPOILERS: Roboquest
Intro:
- Roboquest OST - Metal Hero
Outro:
- Roboquest OST - Nova
Thoughts? Comments? Requests for new episodes? Feel free to email them in!
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
https://www.facebook.com/SoapstonePodcast/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Daily Anecdotes
00:00:34
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake and I am joined by my co-host, as always, Dave. How's it going tonight, Dave? So, so good. So good. Geez, what's so good? Work was pretty minimal. Got to just kind of hang out today. I went to the gym. I got some stuff done at the gym, which is unlike me. You just like clipboard.
00:01:02
Speaker
I went around inspecting the machines. How much sweat is on here? Hmm. They frown on that. They don't actually like when you do that. They do.
00:01:12
Speaker
I actually got like a sweat in at the gym, which is weird because normally I only sweat when we play Smash Brothers. I'm doing like try hard video gaming. Yes, it is. It is crazy how like gross I get. We're at the loading screen into the first match. It was like I got a wipe off my controller. But no, I felt stinky and gross. I felt like I accomplished something which is nice. Yeah.
00:01:37
Speaker
I got to see a friend at the gym, obviously. That's typically when I'll go. And I also got a jacket from them as well, which I still need to try on.
00:01:48
Speaker
And then dinner was passable. It was passable. Mm-hmm. Sometimes that's all you need is a passing grade. But did you get the jacket from the friend or the gym? That's the important question. Like, did you just feel it from the... Always from the friends. Okay. I just found it. It was like on a bench somewhere in the dressing room. No, they're like, hey, I want to give this to you after the gym. I was like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's do that. Gotcha. That's cool. Yeah, I have to wear that tomorrow probably if I go outside. Mm-hmm. Which no promises. Because
Weather Musings and Delivery Dilemmas
00:02:17
Speaker
it'll probably be cold.
00:02:18
Speaker
it oftentimes is, although it's not as bad as when it snowed. We usually get like one of those a year now. Yeah. We're just like, all right, let's justify buying this salt and we can put it on the driveway and stuff. It melts within 24 hours. Completely pointless. I looked out the one morning it was snowing.
00:02:40
Speaker
at some point around like 2pm, I saw like it was fully coated white. I saw like some families out there and it's not like we have a hill behind us by any means, but there was a slant and the kids like were there on their sleds for like three feet of mild acceleration. And then by like 5pm, a lot like half of it was probably melted. Yeah. Yeah. Does not stick around as much here, but
00:03:09
Speaker
That's okay with me. Not that I necessarily need to drive or anything like that, but snow does impede. So we order a lot of things on Amazon. Sometimes, actually it's been a while since I ordered food. It's very expensive now. But we used to order food, you know, during the pandemic and stuff like that. And you gotta, you feel guilty if you do that when there's snow all over the place. Yeah.
00:03:36
Speaker
Yeah, it's very much the if the weather's so shit that I don't want to go out, I don't necessarily want to make somebody else drive in it. But also like I have... There've been times I've not wanted to go out so badly that I've ordered delivery from a place that is scarily close to my apartment and I feel bad about doing that.
00:04:02
Speaker
my laziness or whatever else it was just superseded any human decency in that moment. I think that's fair. As long as you just tip more when they're risking their lives then you're good.
00:04:14
Speaker
I always tip like flat 15 to 20% on anything. It's just easier.
Culinary Adventures and Memory Lapses
00:04:21
Speaker
Um, and if I get kind of clenched butthole about it, I have to remind myself, Hey, you're spending extra money to go do food. Cause you didn't want to make food. You want to get groceries. So it's an incentive to, Hey, if you don't like spending money, uh, shop for your own shit. Yeah. Which we've started doing. It's fair.
00:04:43
Speaker
I had the, I got some, I think it's orange chicken, like make your own popcorn orange chicken basically. It was really good. It was pretty good. I ate it in like two servings. It was probably like four servings.
00:04:58
Speaker
That's just like, if you have like a good tasty meat, I'm not gonna do like half a cup. Yeah. Give me the cup. It's like, because as many people probably know, my cooking is not advanced or some would even describe cooking. So like, I don't have like an entree in sides, right? Where it's like, okay, here's the main part of the meal, we'll put some rice on the sides, some green beans, whatever. It's like,
00:05:22
Speaker
enough orange chicken to sustain me is the amount of food that I'm going to eat. I've reached my calorie threshold, if you will, through this meal. It's pretty good, though. You know, it's going to be fancy when the instructions are like you wait to put the sauce on until it's like the last stage of preparation. That's how you know, I know. And that's what this was. But yeah, orange chicken is pretty good. Recommend it. I feel like I've tried it at some point in the past.
00:05:54
Speaker
I don't remember it, but like any chicken I've had, like a Chinese style thing, love it. The chicken, the Chinese, the Chinese chicken. I wish I could do the rest of the song. I know what you're referencing,
Sneak Peek: Video Game Episode
00:06:07
Speaker
but my brain is farting so hard. I'll be honest, I don't know anything else about what I'm referencing. See, what's weird is the only line I remember from that song is a
00:06:19
Speaker
No, that's a different song entirely. Apparently, this is Bare Naked Ladies, one week and then in parentheses, Chinese Chicken. Oh no, so actually, that is the same song. At some point in that, it's like,
00:06:36
Speaker
Something something under there. And then like there's like a brief pause. And then the person says, I just made you say underwear. And like when I was like 15, I was like, that's actually kind of clever. Like you hear under there, you're like, oh, underwear. Interesting. It's such a throwaway thing, but like the only thing my brain remembers from that.
00:07:03
Speaker
That is funny. Also, everybody knows the it's been. Oh, that's this song. Yeah. Okay. One week since you looked at me. That's funny. It's chickety China. The Chinese chicken. There you go. Okay. You have a drumstick and your brain stops ticking.
00:07:24
Speaker
watching X-Files with no lights on. The song is dated. It's apparently 1998. It's been a one hot minute. But outside of food, video game.
00:07:44
Speaker
You played one. They actually played one. Oh, yeah. Hopefully you're not too surprised at that as we do prepare all of these in advance, obviously. Some people
RoboQuest: First Impressions
00:07:57
Speaker
may have known this episode was coming if they were paying attention to some of the games we were playing on the game activity and things like that, but I don't think we talked about it a lot, if at all. No, I think it was very, very cursory. Mm hmm.
00:08:11
Speaker
Kept it under wraps. We wanted to make sure it was a surprise that we actually do game episodes still. It was a surprise even to us. This is for Robocwest.
00:08:24
Speaker
Yeah. So for anybody who doesn't know, I played this with Mike a long time ago. Um, but this was way back in early access days. This is before the game was at its complete state. And then it rolled around on game pass a couple of weeks back. I'm like, I remember this game. We'll check it out. And it is a rogue like FPS, uh, similar to something like gunfire reborn. And I was like, Oh, this is pretty good. I'm enjoying it. It feels very fast paced and fun. Oh, let me tell Jake about it.
00:08:53
Speaker
And then I looked away, did some dishes, and Jake's like, I'm further than you in the game. And I was like, you bastard. It came back to me. I was like, I've got this map of locations that we need to locate in order to catch you up on certain plot points and things like that. I mean, Dave had cleared. It's fair to say, Dave cleared the game before I had even done all of this side stuff, because you don't have to do everything to beat the game. But there are some mechanics that lend towards beating the game if you do more things, which is nice.
00:09:24
Speaker
Um, how would you, I mean, you described this as a first person shooter, uh, gunfire reborn. Hopefully you guys listened to our episode about that, or you'll have no context for this. Um, but, uh, what, uh, what other kind of inspirations do you think this game might've taken? Like, what would you compare this to if they had never played, maybe they played a rogue like game, but they haven't played a rogue like FPS. Oh God. Um.
00:09:52
Speaker
I guess stylistically, it's closer to Borderlands in that it's very cel-shaded. That's fair. It's even richer than Borderlands, I think. I think Borderlands has sometimes more washed out palette. Yeah, it's pretty much on the cartoon. It pops up a lot. Yeah.
00:10:12
Speaker
I don't know if there's another game I could really compare it to that would be coming to mind. You're the one that stuck out to me. Yeah. The one that stuck out to me was Doom, actually, and the gun play. It's very much that, which is good. For people who haven't played Doom, that is good. When Doom 2016 came out, there was a chance that that was just going to be an absolute failure of a remake slash whatever it is, continuation, reboot. It's a reboot.
00:10:42
Speaker
But it wasn't it was an excellent game. We also did an episode on it You'll have no context for this episode if you didn't listen to it But this one feels pretty good and like gunfire reborn it felt like okay as a shooter I want to say but This one it feels like you're popping off
00:11:00
Speaker
So I think the main difference for me that I noticed between Gunfire Reborn and RoboQuest is Gunfire Reborn seems to be very weapon focused. Then once you have like this is your kind of main weapon, you very much go into passes. Some
RoboQuest: Mechanics and Strategy Deep Dive
00:11:17
Speaker
of it is for your character where you can kind of get
00:11:21
Speaker
depending on your class, some certain things to maybe max out lightning or whatever the fuck. But there's also lots of other things that you can get across characters. And RoboQuest does work in a bit of a similar way, but it feels a lot more movement based than anything.
00:11:42
Speaker
There's not really a life steal mechanic that's baked in. Like it doesn't pop off to the same degree as gunfire does where you can do like a billion damage or something. But like late game, I have so many options to move around and do stuff.
00:12:03
Speaker
I found out a little bit after getting the grappling hook, you can use that on enemies and it stuns them and pulls you to them. Yeah. And then if you keep holding forward, you'll do a head bonk, which is a separate type of damage mechanic. I didn't even I didn't realize that was the thing for the head bonk. Yeah, the grappling hook. It's pretty amazing. There's a lot of things you can unlock in the game that like
00:12:26
Speaker
give you more mobility. And we straight up thought that some of these areas were limited to a specific class. It's like, no, no, you've got to play as this class if you want to reach this. But no, there's ways around that.
00:12:42
Speaker
I would agree with that, where gunfire was like, this is 100% like the gun. I've had builds or runs in RoboQuest, in particular with like the last class that has like very little info, like the gun was a plus. I did not use the gun for a lot of things. It was mostly if they somehow survived the salvo of all the nonsense I was throwing at them. And it feels really good for that. It kind of is evocative of the,
00:13:11
Speaker
Like there are some roguelikes out there where your decisions are kind of like minor stat increases and things like that. And this game has some of that, but then it also has big choices that can like completely change up a run. And that's really important, I think. Yeah.
00:13:30
Speaker
I try and avoid locking myself out of those options early. So if it's like, hey, this is more energy weapon damage, I'm like, I don't know if I'm going energy, slow your roll. Yes. But 15% attack speed bonus, yes. Everything I do, that will be applicable. Hell yeah. Yeah, the game has some cursed items where they have a trade-off. And one of the ones you just reminded me of is the non-magical ring.
00:14:00
Speaker
where it's like all of your elemental damage is reduced by some massive, like 40%, I think, right, or 50. It's a lot. But your non-elemental damage is boosted by like 20, 25, something like that. Like a good, good amount, a good chunk. And in this game, there are a lot of elements, and the two non-elements for those kind of coming from Borderlands, this will be different, are like just standard kinetic weaponry bullets and stuff like that, and explosives. Those are also not elements, technically.
00:14:29
Speaker
Yeah. There's also like a really good spread of the weapon types. And also, if I'm just very much going on my class build initially, and I'm like, oh, we'll see if we get a good gun later. Sometimes I'll just try and wait for that. It feels good to just switch between weapons. Yeah. You have two weapon slots. I'm not usually one to ever swap weapons for situations.
00:14:55
Speaker
But sometimes it is nice if you have the extra slot to, hey, I'm running pretty much a shotgun build, but sometimes I get punished by sniper enemies from really far away. OK, I'll pocket a sniper on the off chance that I run into one of those. Cool. Unless you get the level up option of favorite weapon or favorite weapon. Yeah. Which is just like, oh, well, I think this is only available on classes that have another sort of damage ability.
00:15:25
Speaker
But it's like, OK, well, you only get one weapon now, but here's a big buff, right? And it's usually a pretty good option, unless you're specifically doing some sort of weapon swapping shenanigans. What's the game also supports? Yeah. They even have bonuses for if you swap weapons. But again, I hate doing that. I like grinding one thing into the ground. What was your favorite class, would you say? So I basically had
00:15:54
Speaker
two answers, which was like the class until I unlocked the last class. This is all spoilers. We'll put a disk. Nobody cares. Play the game. It's fun. There you go. There's your disclaimer. I wanted to say recon, like recon is super fun to play. I freaking love playing recon and the wiki here. I'm just going to read this. It's stabbing or teleportation. Recon uses stabportation. That's all you need to know. That's all you need to know.
00:16:24
Speaker
But Dave had to pick me up off the ground a lot When I was playing recon because in like the game is vague. It's kind of like bullet hell esque Which is sort of similar to doom like when you enter an area with a lot of enemies there could be a lot of projectiles and you have to rely on your speed to avoid it and jumping into the middle of all of that is kind of a bad idea in a lot of cases and
00:16:50
Speaker
Yeah. So I went down as recon. Hard to evade and recon is also has a lot of bonuses for melee options. Yes. So it kind of incentivizes you to go in and do that, even though you don't have to. It is definitely the best class for that option. If you're not, you're wasting it because the class doesn't do anything like it's compared to like playing the game other ways. Right. If you're not using the invisibility, hitting people with your knife attacks, like
00:17:20
Speaker
recon doesn't have any bonuses beyond that. No. But I will say the other plus, and I guess major difference between this and something like gunfire is because there's not a baked in life steal or like, here's like your health back mechanic outside of like the checkpoints. It's pretty much, hey, if you shoot or kill an enemy, it'll drop some green cells. And if you go near them, you can pick them up and you'll heal.
00:17:49
Speaker
But they don't last very long, so it kind of encourages you to keep moving forward so you can kill something, get the health, kill something, get the health and keep going forward. Versus if you just, if you have a build that's like, I'm going to salvo from like a mile away and just carpet bomb them, awesome.
00:18:10
Speaker
I hope you're at full health at this point because otherwise, you're really gonna miss out on that. And there are also passes you can pick up for health cells last longer, they heal more. So there's a lot of options in how you can build which I like. But to answer my question, as far as favorite class,
00:18:31
Speaker
I will say I do have a soft spot in my heart for Elementalist because you can do some crazy shit with it but the Hunter one is still my favorite because you can be like, I'm gonna put points in the crits, more points in the crits, more points in the crits and then you get something that fires decently fast and then almost all your stuff is for crits, hitting very hard.
00:18:57
Speaker
I accidentally before like you can unlock things in the game. Oh, no, I hear myself ranting. Take a breath. Take a breath. That's fair. You take a breath as well. Yeah. There are things you can get through the game.
00:19:12
Speaker
which is a part of the progression to get some of those extra movement abilities and other things. You can also make the last boss and levels easier. Right. You get the Chaos Emeralds. Pretty much. Before I had, I think I had maybe one Chaos Emerald.
00:19:29
Speaker
I beat the final boss because my build was here's a high damage sniper and then you're critting really hard and I had a decent fire rate. So I was just chunking off the health bar. It was a god run. It was very fortunate for me. But it felt really good and I haven't been able to do that with any other class. So the ranger will be my go-to.
00:19:51
Speaker
Think I think the Ranger might be like there you can definitely get crit on other characters There's the the game has two like functions for crit one of them. I didn't know about at all Which is just if you hit enemy weak points at crits with most weapons So like headshots and things like that the glowing spot all of the traditional video game things anytime I did that was an accident because I didn't realize it was part of game and Then the other function is auto crit, which is what people traditionally think of for like a random critical
00:20:21
Speaker
And you can stack it on other characters. Different weapon types have different multipliers for the crit chance. Or it's either the crit chance or the crit damage. But certain weapons are just way better as precision weapons. And other ones literally have no natural crit chance. It has to be a weak spot hit or something like that.
00:20:49
Speaker
But the Ranger is by far the easiest one to go for a crit build on. Everything else, it feels like you kind of have to luck into it. And Ranger builds into it as part of their class options during level up.
00:21:03
Speaker
Ranger is the captain of the treaty committee for sure. I love them for that. The itty bitty, pretty committee. There's also, you start out with commando, which I didn't appreciate fully until later, but a lot of their class that builds into, you're going to hit me, it's going to suck for you. And also incentivizing an explosives build.
00:21:31
Speaker
So I might be confusing the two of these. I know there's Commando within Guardian. Commando's the first one. Guardian I think is the yellow guy with the shield on his special. I'll be honest, I've never played this game. Whatever Jake's saying is correct. I have not. I'm looking at the water. I've never actually played Commando. Commando's the guy that's like tempo kills. You're like getting buffs by killing people fast and stuff.
00:21:57
Speaker
I should, but... Yeah, so my commando is the explosive one, right? Yes. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. So, second one you unlocked technically. It feels good to just run in with a grenade launcher or an elephant gun, which just shoots like a salvo of missiles all at once or anything else, missile or bomb related. And you don't necessarily have to aim as much as one might think.
00:22:25
Speaker
And you don't take damage from your own weapons, so you just go to town. And you can also use the explosions to rocket jump. Yes. It's also fun. What you can get like as a random weapons can have an alt fire.
00:22:40
Speaker
and then through your meta progression, you can increase the chance that they'll have an alt fire, which is pretty much the only time it seemed like they started doing that in my game. It's a pretty impactful upgrade. And it's very funny when you have something that can rocket jump that you wouldn't normally think could, but explosives also work for it. And yeah, you mentioned the weapons and some of those types of weapons. There is a very,
00:23:07
Speaker
large pool of weapons that are made up of specifically types. You've got your assault weapons, your precision weapons, you've got your energy weapons. I really like the energy weapons. Those are probably some of my favorite. In particular,
00:23:23
Speaker
the Arctic rifle. It's kind of like a blast of coal. Get out of here. It's so lame. It's very lame. It's very good. So the reason it can be good is because of synergies. Like if you're going for elemental synergies, there's one that's like frozen enemies will be auto crit while they're frozen. Any other attacks just automatically are critical hits. You're like, that's pretty good.
00:23:51
Speaker
but you also have to be able to beat bosses. So, you know, that's something to consider. That is true. Also, I believe energy weapons are more likely to have bounce or like bullet ricochet. Yeah. So if they don't hit a target, they'll bounce off of a wall or something, which again is great for carpet bombing if you're not the best at aiming. Yep. They have heavy weapons as well, which is closer to a chain gun typically.
00:24:17
Speaker
But it could be like a rocket launcher. But those will penalize your movement speed a little bit. But typically it's for the option of more damage. Yeah. There's also like a huge variety of shotguns even. But they all feel good. Actually, let me ask you, do they feel good? Because last time we played a game that had a shotgun in it, I remember you complaining. The shotguns did not feel umfy enough. I think it depends on the shotgun. I think the one I disliked was the bull shotgun.
00:24:47
Speaker
But there are others that are considerably better. There's even
RoboQuest: Style and Comparisons
00:24:51
Speaker
an energy shotgun called the Blunder Buzz. Some of them feel a lot better. But it's also class dependent. I think I might have been playing recon at the time, and there's a question of why would I have a shotgun if my class build is making my combat knife so good?
00:25:12
Speaker
And that's kind of that's kind of part of the build crafting of the game as you're going through a run is figuring out what weapons actually compliment your build. And absolutely, I believe that there are some builds that just like love shotguns, like the Guardian, the first guy that gets the protective shield. Very good with close up weapons. You're just like, I'm just going to push forward. And if I would take damage, I'll decide not to. Yeah, it's a fair game plan.
00:25:38
Speaker
Oh, one of my favorite shotguns is the behemoth shotgun. It is like doom levels of huge. The clip is like three by default, which is bad. It's very low, but it's such a huge spread. The damage is high. And I think that weapon has a built-in passive to it where if you kill an enemy,
00:26:01
Speaker
it will refund you your full magazine. So if you're like one-shotting things each time it's moving forward, you'll never have to reload. And I've never encountered that exact thing, but the idea of that is very cool. Yes. Yeah. It does suffer from the same type of situation where it's like you can't kill a boss in three shots generally, so it might be bad for just bosses. But it's very good at clearing trash and rooms and things like that.
00:26:28
Speaker
And I think that is actually, so that affix, that like text, that special effect you can get on it, I think it is rarity dependent, which is something we haven't talked about. Like a lot of these shooter type games, different weapons may have different rarities. You could encounter a weapon type that you don't really like, but it shows up as like a legendary rarity and it's just full of text. And as anyone who plays MMOs knows more text is better. It's the only thing you have to pay attention to. Um,
00:26:55
Speaker
And the game gives you the option to upgrade your weapons, like throughout the course of a run, which is just excellent, right? Because I can think of games that don't have that functionality where it's like, we're too worried that the game is going to get stale if you're using weapons that you're comfortable with. So we're going to basically force you to use higher level crap that you run across. It's much more fun to get invested in a weapon that is like,
00:27:23
Speaker
It really matches your build. And you put it on the game. You say like, hey, if you want me to swap, you give me something better, right? I'm not going to trade this out for garbage. Take the power back. I've definitely held on to weapons for so long, even though like the damage isn't great. It'll be like a level two blue or something, which I think is uncommon.
00:27:46
Speaker
That's usually what it is in other systems. But it might have like two affixes with it. But like that can honestly sustain me for a bit and I find something else that's kind of comparable. So if I'm running like snipers, I want to find another long range option, another precision weapon. So I will wait until I find one that is doing that same kind of function just better. Yes. And as you go through the game, you can find these chests.
00:28:10
Speaker
where it'll say like, hey, do you want power cells, which would be like your currency in game to buy stuff or with the vendors? Or do you want any of these weapons? Or do you want a passive? Right. So it kind of gives you choices at each of these checkpoints for, hey, is my build good? Do you want to keep investing in what I'm doing now? Or do you want to try and change things up? Yes.
00:28:34
Speaker
Also with the weapons beyond upgrading, you can also kind of re-roll. So it'll stay at that current level of upgrade that it's at, but it will re-roll all of the affixes. So maybe you're doing specifically a cryo build where you want to freeze things, but your weapon's dealing burn damage. Right. OK. It doesn't exactly work. Maybe I can roll until I get cryo. Or maybe I want to roll to get auto-crit or faster attack speed, faster reload speed.
00:29:03
Speaker
It just feels good to have a weapon that you like and to be able to enhance it instead of just, oh, this is a piece of shit. And then you, like you said, you're forced to kind of change up as you go. Yeah, it's completely viable that like you find a pretty good weapon off the very first weapon chest where it's like pick your starter weapon and then through upgrading it, rerolling it, leveling it up, like you use it for the rest of the game.
00:29:29
Speaker
And that's good. The game even rewards you for spending at least a fair amount of time with each weapon because there's like a collection back at base camp for cards for each weapon. And once you get the card for a weapon, it reduces the cost of, I think, either rerolling or upgrading the weapon by one crystal permanently. So it's just like, as soon as you get that card for a weapon, it's just less expensive to keep it in your repertoire for future runs. Like, it's just really cool.
00:29:57
Speaker
Note to self, do that. I got the card for the shovel. I don't know how much I'm going to actually use it, but I thought it would be hilarious to go run just with the shovel someday. It is a decision. Yeah.
00:30:15
Speaker
And it's honestly like I want to compare this to you mentioned borderlands in the art style. A lot of the weapons here feel like they could be borderlands ish guns, especially when you're dealing with elements and energy things or weird ballistics. But unlike borderlands, there's very few weapons where I'm like, this is an absolute throwaway. Like I just hate this. There are some I'm less a fan of, but
00:30:42
Speaker
But usually crossbows and things like that. I'm not huge on the crossbows. What? Everybody's supplicing Jake for a moment. He doesn't know what he's talking about. He's talking out of his ass. Crossbows, I think, can be fine. A single crossbow. All right. But let me compare it to what I hate. Sure. Stuff like the throwing grenade or like the mine launcher. Yeah. Something where it's like it doesn't seem good for anti-air or you have to deal with like an arc shot.
00:31:12
Speaker
And I just want to aim at something, not have to worry about leading the shot and all that jazz. I will say, though, I use the mine launcher at one point. And it's basically, for those who played Overwatch, it's Junkrat's weapon. It's the same thing. You just launch mines, detonate them. It does a lot of damage. It does a tremendous amount of damage. It's just I'm pretty lazy. So I also don't use it that much. As soon as I feel like, oh, this actually requires skill, I'm kind of checking out.
00:31:43
Speaker
That being said, this game does feel good to be skillful at, to land critical hits, to use precision weapons and things like that. You can clear very fast and it does feel like there's in gunfire, it felt like your build has made it or it hasn't. The rest doesn't matter too much. And this one, like you can walk into a room that's very dangerous and like absolutely crush it with your build, with your weapon, with all of that stuff or
00:32:10
Speaker
misplay your placement a little bit in the room, get surrounded, get hit by a suicide guy, and lose like a tremendous amount of health. And it's literally down to execution. There is a skill aspect in RoboQuest.
00:32:22
Speaker
Yeah, like we've been running I think at hard the entire time. Yeah, which I don't think is it might be the hardest difficulty, but it's only like is there? Yes, once you beat the game it unlocks like they do the thing where every time you increase the difficulty it changes the background or the difficulty and like the hard is there's like there's a good amount of enemies like all around in the the background and then there's like
00:32:46
Speaker
supernova I think it's called, which is just like it's full of bosses and things like that. Just this terrible despotic picture of the world. I haven't even tried it. It looks terrible.
00:33:01
Speaker
I might have to try just to be abused a little bit. But even on a hard like taking three projectile shots from enemies at like a later level, it can like almost kill you unless you're building armor specifically and I'm not usually doing that. But it feels really good though as you're saying to kind of weave through the projectiles.
00:33:26
Speaker
I think there's only like one or two things that are homing. So, the typical good strategy is just to strafe and carpet bomb. Or just strafe and shoot them in the weak spot. But you always have to strafe, you always have to be moving. You can strafe vertically as well if you need to. You can crouch to duck something, you can do a super jump if you hold in crouch and then jump. That isn't an item but it's a good item to get fairly early.
00:33:54
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, just like with the movement tech you get, it feels really nice to weave and then poop out your damage, but then it feels terrible if you get hit by like two things. Yes. And you're like, I'm terrible at this game. Yeah. It all feeds back into like the tempo. The developers had a really good idea of like,
00:34:15
Speaker
How do we keep people in engaging gameplay? Because technically you can hang back and just kind of like slowly let enemies sort of line themselves up and snipe them from the previous combat room. But you're not going to be getting S ranks because you're going to be clearing slowly. If you do get hit by a straight projectile, you'll never never heal it, which Dave mentioned earlier. And a lot of enemies just won't position themselves in that situation. It wants you to play it also like Doom, like an arena by an arena.
00:34:46
Speaker
Like you enter an area, you fight all the enemies, they're trying to mitigate damage, avoid damages. You can move into the next arena, do it, do the same and they lock the doors. It's literally kill all the enemies to get into the door. And occasionally you'll have a room that is straight up like you need to enter it and then the door locks behind you. And now you're in a true arena. There's no option to try to take people out.
RoboQuest: Progression and Rewards
00:35:10
Speaker
But they also have purple rooms, which I would consider
00:35:15
Speaker
Loosely challenge room challenges you can hear my air quotes everybody It's usually just go through the purple room and find the chest at the end But there might be traps hazards enemies something that's gonna prevent you. They're randomly generated from like a set of however many But at a point they become so easy or I'm just like let me check what's in that free chest, uh-huh It feels nice And a part of that
00:35:44
Speaker
not even just in the challenge rooms, but throughout the level. Again, this is tied with the tempo of the game. They have grind rails. So, like you can run and you can also essentially use that run button on the grind rail and just like, zoom around to the next area, use that momentum to jump and hover above people and then shoot them from above.
00:36:08
Speaker
Yeah, they're so good when you're like going pretty consistently and killing enemies and not having to stop and be like, where's that one little guy? You just go through like, oh, yeah, when you're in the flow, then it flows. Yeah. And for the for the grind rails, they even give you a buff that persists when you leave the grind rail for movement speed. They're just like,
00:36:32
Speaker
We don't need to give people massive bonuses. You can get a passive that makes the bonus even better or last longer. But just the idea of I just tap that rail, so I'm going to be running faster is enough to make people do it. And that's all you got to do. You just reward gameplay that is going to be more fun or faster. And it's so good for that. It's so good. Running around on the ground feels beneath us.
00:37:02
Speaker
Yeah, and the challenge rooms, they also, you mentioned that by the end, they feel very, you know, freebies in a lot of cases, and it's because of the movement items that you're getting that are unlocked for all your characters once you find that item in the world. And at first I was like, I wonder, is this a bug, right? Like, is it kind of weird that I can grapple hook past everything straight to the chest, right?
00:37:26
Speaker
No, it's intentional. They just said like, hey, if you've reached the point in the game where you got this, which is very late, your reward is you do not have to deal with this anymore, right? It's fine to cheat. Just go for it, you know? And I love when games do that. When they let you break the rules and they're just like, good job. That is intended, right? Because it's a power trip. It lets you flex a little bit and it feels so much better than
00:37:56
Speaker
I unlocked this power up. Everything else in the world just scaled to make my power up useless. Yeah, right. I hate stuff like that. But the game is really good about making the progression that way because when you start out, you basically have a starting chest of weapons you can pick from and then you just kind of go through killing enemies, maybe find another weapon. And then at the checkpoints, you just have a healing bot and another little shitty chest.
00:38:24
Speaker
But as you keep unlocking...
00:38:27
Speaker
things as you go, you'll get the option to run into more vendors or merchants to maybe buy a weapon, upgrade a weapon, buy a passive, do some other stuff. And it makes your runs easier each time. And then as you're also unlocking the movement abilities, it's making your runs easier because you have more options to work with. And also, you're now incorporating these options into your gameplay, which means you've just become better over time.
00:38:56
Speaker
So it feels really good to start from that beginning where you have just like a pea shooter in a dream to I'm above everybody and raining downhill. Yes. Yeah. Like it's not even possible to find the highest tier weapons until you unlock that in the meta progression tree, which uses a currency that can't be used for anything outside of the meta progression tree for almost the entirety of the game. But conversely,
00:39:24
Speaker
Like some of the things that you unlock increase your resource generation. Like you get more of these crystals that you can spend. And they could also make the game more difficult, right? We were talking about the chaos emeralds. If you turn those on.
00:39:39
Speaker
You get some bonuses. It makes the final fight a little bit easier, but it makes it so elites will spawn in your world. And a lot of the times I don't even notice them because the build is working pretty well at that point and you can kind of chunk through them. But they're usually noticeable by like, I just shot the guy and he didn't die. It must be an elite.
00:39:57
Speaker
but they drop even more crystals. So it is this like, okay, you're increasing the difficulty, but you're getting better rewards and it's giving you more fuel to make an even better build as you work your way through a run. And it's very good.
00:40:12
Speaker
I wouldn't say it's Hades good, but this is actually the second most enjoyable roguelike I think I've played. I'm slowly converting Jake into the roguelike. I mean, I've played other games. I played Binding of Isaac. I just only played. I only played Azazel, Azrael. Azazel. Azazel, yeah. Because why would you play anything else? And Dave's over here as a purist with his d6.
00:40:41
Speaker
I only play Isaac. This is also like 20 years old. Like the game has changed so much since I played it. It's impossible to actually go for an item in Isaac because there's 40,000 possible items in the draw pool. Platinum God is now like a PDF. You have to download it. It's six gigs.
00:41:02
Speaker
but another thing that makes the game feel so good and why I'm recommending it is the audio. The guns feel good, they sound good, but the fucking music. When you're in like a little checkpoint room, you get to hear like part of the track kind of muffled without everything and then you open the door and it's like hitting with all the instruments, baby. And like the music just pops off and it's at a tempo that makes you feel
00:41:30
Speaker
driven, like it's very much pump up music, like some very active techno. What it makes me think of visualized is in the like in the shopping areas or the upgrade areas where you're making build decisions and things like that.
00:41:44
Speaker
It reminds me of an idle animation of somebody just rocking on their toes, rocking on the balls of their feet or something like that. And then once you go through the door, you just started a hyper combo in some fighting game. That's the difference and the pace.
00:42:03
Speaker
for the final area there's there's actually like a drop a little bit i mean there's a lot of drops when you enter a combat area but for a while after playing the game i was just finding myself just humming that part specifically that part of the song where you enter that final area it's just very good i think one of my favorites is
00:42:25
Speaker
I think at like the very last level which is a big combat room but they add like another layer to the music in that level and I'm like, it feels so good because like this is pretty much towards the end of the game, your builds very much online and you're like, this is my last step for approaching the boss. Boss also has good music.
00:42:47
Speaker
And also there are multiple bosses through these different areas you go through. Um, some of the areas you have to unlock. So the game is very good at rewarding exploration as well. I would, I don't know. It's just, it's so good. I've had so much fun with it. I technically not played it twice. That's true. Um, yeah, I mean, the fact it's on game pass makes it an easy recommend. I would say for the people don't be like me.
00:43:15
Speaker
And don't pay that much attention to your base camp. As you reach areas, they do show up on a map there in your base camp, like at the museum. Look at that map periodically, because it will tell you like how in the world did I actually end up at like the energy field or whatever? Like you could just see how the areas are connected. Very helpful, tremendously helpful. But the game's just fun. That's that's basically the thing. Sometimes we play games and it's like.
00:43:44
Speaker
Critical from a critical perspective. This is a good RPG or You know like this is fun. It's comparable to some other things I've played and then Robo quest I was just like I'm just sitting here like head banging trying to like is it socially acceptable for me to try to like pull Dave into playing this game right now when he's probably doing something else and
00:44:08
Speaker
And those games can be kind of rare. It's nice. It's nice to encounter it. So heavy recommendation. It's overwhelming. Oh, we didn't even mention it does have co-op. Yes, actually. Two player, two player co-op. Yeah, sorry. It's not like you have like a whole gaggle of people and it would be insane. It would be absolutely crazy. Storming the beaches. But.
00:44:29
Speaker
It felt good. I will say definitely early
RoboQuest: Final Thoughts and Recommendations
00:44:31
Speaker
on that when we just started playing co-op, I was towards the end of the unlockable progression, but not all of the world progression. And I felt like I was doing all the damage and Jake was just like in the back cheering me on. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay, the first runs were a little bit rough, but I was playing Raycon then. I was playing Raycon.
00:44:55
Speaker
But later on, when Jake had more experience and more things unlocked, it felt really good to just clear stuff together. Yeah. If you have two builds that are online, the game doesn't scale like it's not monster hunter or it's like, oh, you dipped your toe into online. We've multiplied all the enemy's health by four times. There's just one other player. I don't care. It's four times. They don't do that. Enemies, if any, if they get harder at all, it's just kind of slightly.
00:45:25
Speaker
So you just get to do a little bit of scaling, but it's not super noticeable. It's just nice to kill some friends regardless of the game. But I think they did a good job of just allowing another person to be there.
00:45:38
Speaker
Also, if Jake has a gun that I want, because all the things are instanced for the chess and the vendors, I could be like, hey, I'm looking for a sniper. And he's like, oh, there's a good sniper here. I'm like, oh, what are the stats? And he'll read things off. And then I might be able to find something for him. So it's nice to be able to intermingle that from a build possibility. Yeah. Though you cannot trade any of the passive items. No.
00:46:04
Speaker
Yeah, no, no way to even provide that for someone else. It's, it's new or bust. Yeah. Which I will say gunfire reborn did a different version of that where you could just drop it. You could drop a thousand and somebody else can pick it up. I forgot about that. Yeah. But again, gunfire, you can get like insanely broken stuff. Yeah. Um,
00:46:29
Speaker
It's a very good game. I'm not sure exactly how many hours in it I have, but I have to check Game Pass. Does Game Pass check that for you? Does it have a time? It'll tell you how many hours you have, yeah. It's probably around 40 or 50, I think, which is quite a lot for this type of game. But I found myself in a position where I was like, I kind of just want to do another run, which is how you know it's a successful roguelike. You're like, I don't even really have a goal, right? I'm not even like trying to get another unlock.
00:46:57
Speaker
I don't really need another clear. I kind of just want to play the game. Excellent sign. Excellent sign for your game. Yeah. Like I even challenged myself once to do a recon run and we got so close. I went all into melee. The movement felt very fun.
00:47:17
Speaker
But yeah, it's nice to just, hey, I've never tried this weapon, never tried this class, or I've never tried this class with this type of build. It's cool to just try things and mix it up. Because nothing feels ostensibly bad. Yeah. But I definitely have my own preferences, but I was only able to find those out from trying every gun that I picked up. Like, how does this shoot? And then trying different classes. Yeah. And even within the class, we didn't really mention this. Like, there are...
00:47:44
Speaker
There's like upgrade paths. So you have like the first class upgrade. One example might be like, um, for engineer who has these deployable drones that can like fly around and stuff. You can upgrade the number of drones you have. Now each one has a little bit lower health, but you can have like a freaking ton of drones flying around. Right.
00:48:03
Speaker
Or you could take a different path, and that would have like three upgrades, right? Or you could take a different path that makes them shurdier, like they have more health and they're more likely to draw aggro, right? So now it's like, I'm getting more utility out of these guys. You can like give them additional weapons. And these are all usually like three upgrades bundled together where you grab the first one, the next two in the set are very, very likely to come up.
00:48:28
Speaker
And that's cool because it means like once you're done, once you're looking at like the class features there at your base camp for everything that you've unlocked, you can be like, I think in this next run, I'm gonna try to get these ones, right? I'm gonna try to start these paths. It's a tremendous amount of control that a lot of times you don't get in a pure RNG roguelike, right? Like for Isaac, you're like, oh, if I wanna get Leo or something like that,
00:48:55
Speaker
Good luck. How are you going to do that? You can also get re-roll tokens, both as part of an unlockable or you can buy it from a shop. So if you don't see the perfect option you want for maybe starting off a class build, you can possibly re-roll into it. Or you can also just pick something generically good across all builds too.
00:49:24
Speaker
Yeah, this is definitely this kind of game where like I basically have a completed character and I would go back and just like
00:49:31
Speaker
play one of the classes that's a lot less, it feels a lot less sophisticated, a lot less advanced, maybe a little bit less spoilery, and just like force myself not to hit the grapple button to play through with a new player like in co-op. And then just play in their world so random things don't happen that are just gonna be spoilers or stuff they wouldn't have access to. You'll still be more powerful than them, but you can kind of constrain it.
00:49:59
Speaker
And it's just a very fun game to play through. The gameplay is good. Yeah. There's something else actually going to add. I just blanked on what it was. God, why have you forsaken me in this moment? Print of the show. Print of the show, God. Special guest. Always a special guest.
00:50:25
Speaker
I'm going to talk while Dave does that, so we can just have a whole bunch of silence. I'm fishing deep in thoughts right now, I apologize. No, it's all good. The presentation's very good. We're likely to cover more games, I would say, within Game Pass. But even if this isn't Game Pass, I mean, right now it's on sale on Steam. As of recording, I don't know if that'll still be the case when this goes live.
00:50:51
Speaker
And it's definitely worth it. Like I said earlier, it's got overwhelmingly positive reviews on Steam and it's very much deserved. It feels like a very cohesive experience. It doesn't feel like a game where there's anything superfluous. Everything that's there seems pretty intentional and good. And it went through early access, like Dave said. He started playing it in early access and this is another
00:51:15
Speaker
sign that you can come out the other side of early access with a good game and there can be an end to it. So, shout out to RoboQuest. I can't think of what I was trying to think of. That thought has escaped me. That's fair. That's a comeback 20 minutes after we're done recording, I know it. Uh-huh. And the plot's okay.
00:51:39
Speaker
The plot is there just to be like, here's a very loose framework. That's it. And that's fine, because I don't think it needs a plot. It's not a story game. They're just like, why are you here? Oh, this is your vague motivation. Cool. I will say the game does. It's not a mess. I'm not going to count this against the game. But it has like text logs you can pick up that do a little bit of world building from the perspective of whoever is leaving the text log.
00:52:09
Speaker
I don't care that much. I don't think I read most of them. Some of them I read a little bit more, but it's not going to be as compelling as like a BioShock entry or something like that, right? It doesn't it didn't feel like it was necessary for the game, but the game counts it as collectibles and there are good rewards for getting all of them. So I guess you I guess you do it.
00:52:36
Speaker
But yeah, I don't count it against the game. I also don't really count it as much of a plus.
00:52:42
Speaker
I remember what I was going to say. Yeah. All right. Listen up, pro gamers. There are some classes. Let me first of the context. Again, I'm a very like blunt, single mind, single thought, focused person in these types of games, meaning I just want to do my gun stuff and pretty much focus everything into that. I just want to hold the left click for my attacks.
00:53:07
Speaker
I don't want to have to do right click or like V or a brace to do these other alt fires or your class ability.
00:53:17
Speaker
you can bind multiple inputs to the same button. I don't work on this. Be careful how you use this, because if you're playing the ranger, your right click or your class ability will stealth you, and another one will throw a spear, which will take you out of stealth. So depending on how you want to do that. But I've definitely on some classes been like, this is all one button, and it works pretty fucking good.
00:53:44
Speaker
I guess that's fair. I could see it for some of them. I actually, is that true? I don't know. It feels like having them on separate buttons gives you more flexibility regardless. It's probably a decent controller game. I didn't check that or things like what the auto aiming.
00:53:59
Speaker
Would be I don't really like cheese I'm controlling I I really like it with keyboard and mouse just because if I need to If I'm dashing on a rail and then jumping off and I need to like turn around and shoot somebody Yeah, I don't want to have to have insanely high sensitivity. Just give me the mouse right now where I'm gonna be looking at. Yeah, you know Really good game though recommend people play it if you have game pass definitely there's no reason you have no excuse not to play if you have game pass
00:54:30
Speaker
I think it's around 20 bucks on Steam, a little bit less on sale. Uh, it's still worth that to be honest. So check it out. Robocrest, first, first recommended game of the new year. And it came out last year.
00:54:48
Speaker
and we'll be doing a new recommended game every week. Every week, yes. Our new format where I don't sleep. Yeah, definitely solid. If there's other games like this that you guys would recommend for us, you can fulfill Dave's fantasy of getting me to play more roguelikes. I'll play good roguelikes. We'll say that. I'll play good roguelikes.
00:55:18
Speaker
There's like three of them. How hard could it be? Send those in. Soapstone Podcast at gmail.com. Or you could join the discussion on Facebook where you could join all of the other bots, all of your bro bots, Facebook.com slash soapstone podcast. And as always, we'll see you in the next one. Are you still here? Go home, go to bed. Get out of here. Go be gone.