McDroid (Xbox One) Review With Live Stream

Item Reviewed

Author

Colorful art style

Difficult to figure out what is going on
Lack of overall direction

It’s Not a Robot Sandwich –

Blending tower defense and third person action, McDroid is a confusing and tasteless ten dollar download.

It is more complicated than it looks

Playing as a robot dog-thing, the goal is to gather resources to build turrets to defend your crashed spaceship. Along the way the player can upgrade defenses through a real time skill tree awkwardly mapped to the D-pad and manually attack aliens with the right trigger. But unlike similar games like Ubisoft’s Toy Soldiers, McDroid is more focused on the slower and more mechanical resource gathering and environmental acknowledgement as opposed to run-and-gun action.

The problem comes from how the game is presented to the player. Many modern titles are criticized for having too many time consuming tutorials but McDroid doesn’t give the player enough. Outside of a single image sign post, I was left wondering what I was supposed to be doing on more than one occasion. Killing enemies will sometimes drop orbs, which are used to plant strawberries, then strawberries are farmed to make guns… the chain of progression is a little confusing. You can watch me get frustratingly confused from the stream below.

Once the overall mechanics are sorted out, McDroid’s true colors unfold. Sure, the cel-shaded graphics are a nice touch but getting stuck on the environment and even having the game acknowledge the extensive amount of invisible walls as a bad fourth-wall breaking joke put this title in the amateur category. Collecting resources and building an army of self-firing cannons is such a major part of the gameplay but ultimately grows repetitive just a few stages in and never feels powerful enough, enemies swam with tiny hard-to-read health bars, and the hub world seems unnecessary.

McDroid doesn’t really do tower defense or 3^rd person action right and ends up as a sloppily slapped together digital download. Like that highly anticipated new restaurant, the quality ingredients and ideas are there but falls apart when cooked together.