Was the game fun to play?
Definitely. I liked this game way more than I expected to once I spent a minute to understand how it worked. Switching between the modes to keep the numbers down and seeing the robot evolve is great fun. The mini game where you have to predict the next bit isn’t the most exciting game on the planet but it’s not terrible by any means and I kept at it until I got a score of 5 out of 5. Maybe something cool could happen when you win like some text that scrolls with WINNER! I think something like a binary puzzle could be a more fun game to include while still keeping with the robotic nature of the game.
Did the game include the core elements from the original?
Yes. I can definitely see the alert system from the original which is great. There’s also a robot that makes a good replacement for the creature from the original. The robot can also change forms and it animates nicely. There’s lots of stats to manage and for this game that takes the form of charging the battery, overclocking the cpu, cleaning the overstack and removing viruses.
Was there a clear path of progression?
Yes. Progression is done through the runtime which affects evolution of the robot so it starts with a BitBot, then evolves into a ByteBot, then a KiloBot and MegaBot etc (I love how the naming convention ties into the size of numbers so it will be giga, then tera, then maybe all the way to zetta).
How good was the audio and sound FX?
The background music is really nice to listen to. The sound effects for the menu beeps were great. The warning noise is definitely what I’d expect for one, and while it isn’t so nice to listen to, it does the function well and makes you actually want to fix the problem quickly.
How well implemented was the UI?
Exceptional. I feel like the game is centred around the UI and there’s both Human UI and Debug UI. The icons in the human UI have a nice clean minimalistic style that corresponds well with what they do. I like that the white changes to blue to stand out on the button you are on. The text rolls in really nicely on just the one icon that you are on to keep things looking good. The dot matrix style feels very fitting for the 1990’s time period. The clock takes centre stage due to its importance for the robot’s evolution. The clock has an interesting style to it and tells the correct time on the real time mode and it’s great that the simulation time can be increased by 2, 10 or 60 times faster. I think 60x is only useful if you are in sleep mode so you have got to be careful going that fast otherwise you risk system health. 10x seems fine in the debug mode and maybe 2x is doable in human mode but it depends on the pace you want to go at. The pause and complete failure is conveyed really well with the moving yellow lines over the icons and I like that you can easily restart the game again. The input buttons on the bottom makes sense with the return button taking you back to the top left corner quickly where you need to do most of the stuff like recharging the battery and removing the viruses. Going into sleep mode means no need to worry about issues and if you got it in real time mode you could also sleep without any beeps. I like that sleep mode is limited to just between the hours of 9pm and 9am each day for that purpose.