Medabots AX: Metabee Version

"My Money Would Have Been Better Spent On a Bag of Peanuts..."

Japan has been known to release some weird cartoons over the years, with Metabots fitting quite nicely into that category. Talking Robots that battle? Like I haven't seen that a hundred times before……..Metabots AX is a game based off of this forgotten cartoon, perfectly demonstrating what happens when a developer is in it for the money.

Starting the game up, I was actually quite impressed. It had a decent system of battle, a nice level of customization, and some superb graphics. As it turned out though, that was but skin-deep. Battles, although nicely put together, suffer heavily from being far too repetitive for their own good. Yes, they do follow a very well put together system, almost similar to something like SSBM, but they just didn't capture that magic. As I've said in the past, SSBM has one advantage and one advantage alone over every other fighting game out there, the ability to have differentiation.

Whereas that game makes it known that each character have their strengths and weaknesses, Metabots follows a very fine line between sameness that is almost never really broken. Sure, customization is definitely present within the title, but it just doesn't really feel like it's actually posing an impacting reality onto the game. It can help on occasion when it comes to moving more quickly in water, but experiences like that are extremely few and far between. In a game that supposedly was meant to boast extreme customization, this system, although having an immense amount of parts, was really useless.

The battles themselves can actually be fun though, on occasion. Taking a page from SSBM was probably in their best interest, as it helped them more than you could have ever believed possible. Fast action gaming, expansive level design, and a great level of ingenuity helped make this title playable while slowly overcoming ever other fault that was present. Now I'm not saying that it's the best in the world, because it really isn't. Problems abound when it comes to implementing the vast amount of parts that were used. Not only that, but the game also had problems when it came to avoiding button mashing to the extreme.

Since this game did have button mashing, you can imagine the pixel output that had to go out in order to make it work. The graphics truly are great, focusing heavily on an anime style that always has a great way of making things better for the game. It was as if they took everything that should have been right in the first place, and implemented it along with their own unique style that the series itself helped along. If you've ever watched an episode of Medabots, then you're probably well aware that it has a rather strange look to it. It's pretty grainy, and it almost looks as if its working on itself. In a way, that look was excellently incorporated into this game, providing what made the anime itself be such a success.

The story of this game though, is severely lacking. The main problem was that it was short, extremely hard to follow, and choppy. Of those three sadly, the shortness plagues it the most. The game itself, clocking in at a miserable ten hours if you decide to get everything, makes it seem as if they weren't even trying to get a story off. In a sense, the story wound up being a simple tacked on additive that contributed nothing. I don't know if it would have been just better for them to abandon it entirely, rather than making the game look even worse than it was before.

Although being short hurts this game, you can definitely see where those other two points really contribute to the torture. Just when you think you have something figured out from what the characters are saying, the game has a nasty habit of saying something else totally random that makes you think something wrong entirely. Was it meant to be a mystery? Probably not, because if so, then it definitely did a horrible job of getting it off. Contributing to that was the over-abundant choppiness. Both worked together to make the story illegible, which hurt.

In closing, I can't really say I enjoyed this game. It definitely had its problems, and those problems wound up making the experience a horrible one. If you do feel the urge to buy this game, then you could probably wind up picking a copy up for about five bucks, although those five bucks would probably be better spent on a bag of peanuts.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 03/19/07