[h2]Overall[/h2]
Robo Rolo is a quaint and charming short platforming adventure, albeit rough around the edges. It invites you to explore and find your own ways to navigate its little worlds, improving your skills with R0-L0 along the way. I'd put a casual playthrough at ~3-4 hours to go through all the stages and beat the final level, which feels like plenty for the asking price.
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That being said, I'm going to go into a lot more detail here, because I feel like Doodle will appreciate some more granular feedback about my experience.
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[h2]Difficulty[/h2]
One of the first things I want to mention as it seems to be the only consistent thread across the reviews currently is the difficulty of the game in general. I'm going to be frank and say that I disagree. There are some (relatively) difficult tasks in the game, but outside of the final level, you are given the opportunity to skip pretty much whatever shards you wish. Beyond that, there are checkpoints and no lives to concern yourself with, so you are free to explore and effectively try whatever you'd like without consequence in a lot of situations. What I will say though, is I feel that the difficulty [i]balance [/i]during the campaign feels odd at times, and control of R0-L0 themself bugged me a little, even after putting in the time to master movement (relative to the game's requirements).
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Though it isn't the sole thing, I believe the biggest factor to the awkward balance is bonus or secret portals in a few of the levels, which mostly posit a much more difficult challenge than the main stages themselves. I don't believe it is explained anywhere that these are specifically meant to be bonus challenges, and I really only am making that guess because they aren't listed on stage shard checklists, and from learned experience playing through them. This was especially clear to me when I first started and entered the intro stage, and had to get good really quick to beat the clock. Having only a few seconds to spare when making no glaring mistakes on the first level, when I still have signs telling me how to jump, threw me for a loop. I think if I knew out of the gate these were special challenges, I would've treated them differently and came back to them later, instead of assuming the game was going to be significantly harder, and opting to get that experience [i]now.[/i]
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R0-L0 is awkward to control, which I'm sure is by design and important to the mechanics of the game. You learn about how those mechanics operate, and can turn them into a force to be reckoned with. Even after several hours of play though, the one control element I still don't jive with is the linking of both the speed boost [i]and[/i] the brake to be a simultaneous action. I believe the intention is to be able to angle the camera around and boost in various directions, and sometimes you do, but a lot more of the time I found myself either wanting to actually stop while platforming, or wanting to maintain my speed. While already in motion, the boost is pretty ineffective to gain speed since it literally slows you down. While platforming, I need to stop at specific points, which effectively forces me to charge up a boost I absolutely do not want, unless I repeatedly tap the boost/brake button so that the percent never gets high enough for R0-L0 to fly off the platform. Even when fully charged, holding a boost nearly immobilizes you and even prevents you from jumping effectively, and if you release a boost, you cannot start breaking/boosting for a time after you let go. If there was one thing I could change, it would either be separating the two actions, or at the very least giving me a button to cancel a boost I am charging.
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[h2]Exploration[/h2]
The game touts a non-linear exploration approach to collecting and is very hands off after telling you about the controls in the initial stage. I think that in general this is a pretty entertaining way to handle the stages, and beyond that, the game not having any invisible walls was always inviting me to improve my skills by simply trying to do things I am sure were never intended to begin with. It's a little double-edged though, since this hands off approach means if you are stuck, you are all on your own. There are no markers of any kind, just a checklist in the pause menu which won't even hint at what you're missing, just that you are missing [i]something[/i]. I do think that for a general play-through this is okay though, given you can skip lots of shards and still beat the game, and the maps themselves are small enough to double back over to try and unearth more treasures.
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The hands off approach also definitely backfired on me a couple of times, namely with sparks and the Waste Factory fan. I honestly don't know if I missed a sign or something, but I honest to god had no idea what sparks did outside of be shiny and direct me places. It actually did not occur to me once while playing that I would be able to use the sparks to upgrade R0-L0's abilities! I actually felt like such a dummy when I basically already 100%'d before rolling into the beam of light on the hub and realizing I could spend sparks to get upgrades. You might assume a player would roll into a beaming light next to them, but since I just beamed up to the ship, I fully assumed it was cosmetic and never even tried. As for the Waste Factory fan, because the switch was nowhere near the room, and there was no in-world element to direct me to another location, I ended up doing a very difficult and convoluted setup to entirely skip the fan, bounce on the outside, climb the decorative piping, and boost into the top platforming. Only after this did I (eventually) locate the real solution much farther away and once again feel like the worlds biggest dummy. Though I will say I feel like where it is now, either players will get confused, or people will solve it before they even realize it needed to be solved, which feels like a lose-lose in my opinion experience wise. That is, unless they refuse to give up so much, they do what I did and get satisfaction out of breaking barriers I suppose, I really do enjoy theory-crafting unintended solutions.
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[h2]Misc[/h2]
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[*]The top right corner is a health bar. It took me a long time to realize this because the majority of the time you either die in one hit, or fall out of the map. I think the only place it matters at all is in Volcandra, and the Volcandra segment of the Final Gauntlet. I think with how limited its use was, the fire and fire enemy honestly could've just been one hit kills like everything else.
[*]Sometimes it is hard to go back to a checkpoint (i.e. you cannot die quickly, or at all). For those moments I wish I had a revert to checkpoint button, maybe in the pause menu. This was especially true in the Final Gauntlet stage, where it could take upwards of 10 seconds to finally reach the death plane and reset after falling off, dependent on where you are.
[*]By far, the most time I spent theory-crafting was in the beat the clock secret stages. I think leaning into this a bit for the post game, and allowing people to either time collecting single shards, or perhaps timing collecting all shards in a level would provide extra replay value, and also mechanic mastery. It doesn't need to give further rewards, just the timing itself (and maybe some baseline par times initially) could be a huge boon. When the goal is to get people to master unorthodox movement, you may as well give players extra ways to use that mastery afterward. Also showing my best time on secret stages would be greatly appreciated, for the same reason.
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