obscuritory
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In Robomaze II, you play as a robot working for a rebellion against an evil dictator, climbing a massive tower and fighting off cybernetic enemies. It’s like RoboCop meets Die Hard.
Instead of that, Robomaze III is a game where you go into the woods and fight penguins.
The third Robomaze is a drastic departure for the series – from shooting robots in a skyscraper to a game inspired by The Legend of Zelda.
For as much as Robomaze III repeats the same mistakes as its predecessor, there’s certainly good shock value to this change. A witch turns you into a frog at one point.
Robomaze III (read on The Obscuritory)
The Dome is an overgrown mystical forest with witches, monsters, and soothsaying hermits. The robot’s armor powers don’t work out here, and for a contrived reason to start the game without a weapon, he accidentally left his gun back in the Tower. With no modern defenses, he’s gotta fight his way to the evil dictator with a sword.
And guarding the door to the fearsome dragon who rules over the top level of the Dome, it’s a pit full of ghosts! Sure. There’s ghosts now.
It’s like the game dumping every idea it has into a pot and letting them stew for a while. As flawed as Robomaze III can be, the way that it tosses out any sense of continuity and goes in an almost randomly opposite direction can be a hoot. Robomaze III doesn’t go far with that contrast though, because it gets stuck on the action and level design issues that the previous Robomaze couldn’t get right either.
This probably shouldn’t have been a Robomaze game, and the developers may have recognized that too. It was repackaged a year later as Dome Quest, then reworked as a sequel or a do-over called Hoosier City. With a bunch of tweaks – and without the burden of being a Robomaze sequel – Hoosier City finally feels like the strange dystopian Zelda-type game that the developers were always trying to make.
Robomaze has always felt weirdly oppressive to me because of its unusual EGA resolution and broken controls. It doesn’t look right and it doesn’t feel right and you die all the time. But you know there’s an interesting story and a world there - like, hell yeah I want to be a badass robot blasting my way through this tower or whatever - it’s just not actually interested in having you as a player anywhere near it.
Reading this I guess Phil finished? All the Robomaze games?? This seems unthinkable to me.
That’s such a better way to put it then I did. I didn’t even touch on those stretched-out graphics.
I got to the end of Robomaze III: The Dome (without successfully beating it) but not The Final Journey; I completed a chunk but not all of Robomaze II; and I played enough of Robomaze I to get the idea.
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