Parliamentary Disagreements And Evil Robots Of Doom

Some days you want to immerse yourself in a lush green environment and wander for hours. Some days you want to be a gigantic clunky evil robot with a massive gun containing unlimited ammo destroying things as part of a complete overreaction to a letter.

Today is a robot day so I have spent part of the morning ruining other people's day by destroying them and their things in Evil Robot Of Doom Crushes Innocent Town Due To Parliamentary Disagreement. They are pixel people. I am a pixel monster.

I'm fine with being a pixel monster.

Anyway, about the game: it's by Nik Sudan and was originally made for the Ludum Dare 25 game jam back in 2012 (the theme being "You are the villain").

"Control the robot of the mad local member of parliament hellbent on destroying his neighbouring town after they sent him an insulting letter regarding his parliamentary decisions."

It's a simple side-scrolling shooter with ground which tilts under your feet and planes which fly at your body. You have two weapons – a gun and a rocket launcher. The rocket launcher does that rocket launcher thing of taking a while between hefty shots but being great at wiping out the buildings at your feet. The gun is far better suited to taking out the meeple-esque inhabitants and the planes.

You lose fuel over time and getting hit by planes will take a chunk of fuel off too. Blasting planes, houses and people nets you points. Fuel can be replaced by mousing over the nuclear reactor-looking things as you go. And that's it.

Top tip: point your gun at the ground over to the right as a default position - it keeps your meeple killing spree up and also picks off planes which might zoom at your midriff.

Alice is currently complaining at me about the robot in chat - "So sluggish and wonky, refusing to go where I want to go. I didn't have an invincible death robot, I had a thing lazily waving its arms and running into planes."

Look, Alice. You're a giant robot with giant heavy mechanical arms. Sure, he's clunky and slow but he's just a big dumb b-movie monster with all the grace those usually have.

"Pip, I'm sorry, but we are never ever ever building a giant death robot together. Like, ever."

FINE.

The complaint *I* had was that the title promises crushing. I didn't feel like I got to do crushing, just shooting. I mean sure, I have giant evil robot feet so you'd assume crushing is taking place anyway, but man, it would be really nice to crush something underfoot.

I just crushed a crisp under my foot as an experiment in whether adding stomping to the game would help – it felt really empowering but now I have to go and get the hoover. Conclusion: in game stomping would be useful because FRANKLY I only have so many crisps.