Some video games wear their inspirations on their sleeves, like later Castlevania games being influenced by Super Metroid – for the most part that influx of ideas is great.  Then there are times that you get games like Mario Brothers and The Great Giana Sisters where one is clearly just using the other’s success, design and core ideas to profit.  A Robot Named Fight is makes no excuse for the fact that it is a barely functioning reskin of a Super Metroid randomizer ROM hack.

The entire selling point of A Robot Named Fight was that it was a rogue-like, something popularized recently by the highly successful Rogue Legacy game.  The difference between the two is that were Rogue Legacy lets you make progress between the generations/runs of the characters (carrying over upgrades bought and purchasing new upgrades), A Robot only adds new things that may appear in the next run of the game.  Keep in mind that isn’t a guarantee that they will show up, just a slight possibility that they might.

There is a series of issues with this, starting with the fact that the game can screw a run pretty easily simply by dropping worthless upgrades instead of anything practical.  Anything from health ups to weapon tanks pickups are randomized, so you can have a run where you receive loads of ammo for secondary guns, and almost no health upgrades.  This is, of course, before even getting into the entirely worthless powerups that can be found (such as the “make bullets bigger” gun), that seem to serve to make the weapons either slower, weaker, or sometimes both.  That is, of course, before even taking into consideration the fact that there are multiple pickups that have the same end result as others—the slide move vs the spider morph both get the player through small openings and serve little to no other reason.

The visual design of the game feels more like someone through different rooms from previous Metroid games and carefully tried to recreate them in whatever free to use game creating software that they had around.  Almost all enemies move in predictable “go directly at player” patterns, and most of the time feel like reskins from more well-made games.  A perfect example of this is in several areas the enemies that seem to be floor alligators that look like and behave exactly like Crunchran from the original Megaman games, just with a different set of pixels pasted over the top of them.

A Robot Named Fight is a functional game, if even barely.  Mechanically, aside from level design, there does not appear to be anything wrong with it; simply that everything inside of it has been done better elsewhere – and normally for free.  Making the entire world a giant Rogue experience might seem neat, but when that means that powerups are uneven it also means that enjoyment is as well.  Add into that some functions, like a save pod, are locked behind playing the game and dying several times and the game just seems to think more of itself than is there.  It is pretty easy to tell anyone even passingly interested in this game to simply look elsewhere.