The Robbers

Oh God. I hate this. I hate this whole thing. I hate reviewing these awful, awful games, even it is down to once a fortnight. I can't believe there was a time when I did this twice a week. What was I thinking? See, the "bad game" reviews are always posted so late because I just can't bring myself to actually write about these monstrosities. Every word is like an ice pick through the temple. It inspires nothing but pure, unadulterated rage and depression, and that usually gets directed straight at the source of my anger. This week, that would be The Robbers.



Oh Jesus, how I hate this game. Hate it with the fiery intensity of a million suns! What an ugly, awkward, frustrating game this is. It makes one wish they suddenly lost all five senses so none of them would be sullied by this terrible game. Yes, even the sense of smell, such is the horrendous stink of The Robbers.

Why is it so bad? Look, can you just take my word for it this one time and save me the hassle of writing another 500 words on the subject? No, of course you can't, because anyone who reads this on a weekly basis is a sadist and I am your bitch. OK, where to begin. First of all, it's a puzzle game that wants to be a platformer that wants to be... I don't know, Kitten Cannon. You've got three robbers, and each of them has a skill. One can climb walls, one bounces off walls and one can push things. None of that sounds the least bit impressive, but you don't need a PhD in theoretical physics to smash in a window.



And by God, does this game look ugly! They were probably going for something gritty, urban, stylised. They ended up with garbage. Are the robbers even human? I can't tell. The big one looks like some kind of ape creature. You've got a limited amount of time to reach a big jewel and you move the characters around by clicking and dragging the mouse. In a miniature golf sim, that works fine. In anything else it's slow and annoying. In The Robbers it's so frustrating that it makes me want to chew a pigeon. Jesus, that last sentence doesn't even make sense! Why would anyone do that!? This game is driving me insane!



Half the levels aren't even possible! I should have known exactly what I was getting myself into when I was trying to get bouncy boy past a rotating platform. Nine times out of ten it can't be done. No matter how strongly you throw the characters they don't jump for squat. When this guy hits a wall he goes frickin' crazy, bouncing off every available surface. But you've still got to get him over this platform and he just doesn't move fast enough to do. If you could jump again in mid air things would be much easier, but you can't do that either. Even if you manage to land on the platform, you'll never jump off it fast enough to keep from slipping back down to the ground. It's a good thing the first eight levels are unlocked from the start or I wouldn't have seen any more of the game.

Wait, that's not a good thing at all!



Most of the time all you can do is set the power to maximum and pray for a miracle because God knows there is no way the average human gamer could figure out a real strategy for success. Half the time the puzzles are just completely moronic, anyway, like the level that sees the big guy Brute overcome obstacles by jumping up again and again and again. Or how about the climber trying to reach a jewel as one of the walls closes in? The wall moves so fast that you can't possibly reach the jewel in time, and even if it didn't get caught behind the wall you're not able to climb up there anyway. You'd think if the walls were closer together it would make jumping from one to the other easier, but apparently The Robbers is set in Crazy Cuckoo Land, where common sense doesn't exist!

To hell with this game! Let it burn in the pits of Hades for all eternity! Oh God... God, this game is awful!

Road Hunter GT

I looked up the definition of GT, or "Grand Tourer" ("Gran Turismo" in Italian) because something about its use in the title of Road Hunter GT just didn't sit right with me. So here's what I found, courtesy of Wikipedia:

GT - "Grand tourer (Italian: gran turismo), usually a high-performance luxury automobile designed for long-distance driving"

And that's probably what it was; though you do indeed drive long distances in this game, there's nothing luxurious or high-performance about it.

The plot is simple: you're about to carry out a bank job, after which you must weave through traffic while avoiding the police and the Mafia. You begin by stealing a taxi and driving it 150 miles to the bank.



Seriously, 150 miles. You are robbing a bank in another city - in another part of the country! I'm willing to suspend my disbelief up to a point, but that point comes long before driving a stolen taxi 150 miles on the straightest road this side of the autobahn to rob a small-town bank.



You drive your stolen taxi incredibly slowly through some very uninspired quasi-suburban landscape that seems to stretch into infinity. There are puddles and cracks all over the tarmac, but these are entirely aesthetic and have no effect on the handling of your car. For some reason just driving to the bank earns you cash, like perhaps you decided to pick up some fares as you went to commit acts of grand larceny. One thing you'll no doubt notice is that your life bar is constantly decreasing, so you need to keep topping it up by collecting hearts that lay across the road like the aftermath of some terrible accident involving a sixteen-wheeler with a load of donated organs.

At first I thought the life bar was actually supposed to be a petrol gauge, which would make sense - if you're driving 150 miles, you're going to need to fill the tank at least once. But if that's the case, why not just call it the fuel gauge? Why not use little canisters of petrol rather than hearts? The answer is because it really is supposed to be a life gauge, and much like the human body this taxi is hurtling inexorably towards the end, constantly postponing the inevitable with tune-ups and stolen organs.

It is, in all honesty, bullshit. Why should the life bar go down when you're avoiding the other cars? Why should a player be punished for doing well? And you better hope to God that you don't crash, because if you hit more than one other vehicle you'll never see past the first level. So you do what anyone would do in real life to avoid an accident - you drive slowly and keep as much of the road in front of you so you don't get caught off guard. The result is a slow, ponderous game, and it doesn't get any better after you've reached the bank.



After stealing the money (a scene represented by your character walking into the bank and then walking out of the bank) our young robber ditches the taxi and jumps into a sports car that I can only assume was sitting there waiting for him.

OK, so if there was a car there already, why steal the taxi? I mean, is this guy such a prick that he can't just spend a little cash on a train ticket, or something? Or better yet, if he's already been there to arrange the sports car, why not just stay there instead of travelling 150 miles to some other town? This probably explains why he works alone - not because he's a tough loner incapable of trusting others, but because none of the other robbers are willing to put up with his stupid ass.



So now the Mafia are after you, for reasons that are never fully explained, and they're chasing you in cars armed with ballistic missiles. Strangely, the numerous police cars that you pass on this endless highway show not one ounce of interest in the Mad Max road war taking place before them. I know the police can be apathetic at the best of times, but surely they're going to respond to the cluster bombs pockmarking the highway?



Fortunately you're not just a sitting duck. Someone was kind enough to leave missiles all over the road, which you can pick up and use against the numerous Mafiosi. But you can only shoot in one direction, straight up, and that's a real pain in the ass if the enemy is on the other side of the screen. At moments like that your only hope is to drive by as quickly as possible and hope you don't get hit. You don't find any other weapons that might make destroying the other cars easier, so it's a case of hoping for the best, and that rarely gets you anywhere.



For a game boasting only three levels Road Hunter GT is surprisingly difficult to beat. Like anything else it just takes a little practice, but why would you want to spend your time beating a game so ugly and plodding? There are a hundred games just like it, and most of them are far superior to this. Throw this one on the scrapheap and forget it even existed.