Bullets and music. Guest reviewer, Dave Corn is here to take at a look at Robobeat from developer Simon Fredholm and publisher Kwalee.

“Keep your trigger finger on the pulse! In rhythm shooter ROBOBEAT, you’ll play as Ace – a bounty hunter on a mission to capture robot-gone-rogue Frazzer in his ever-shifting lair. Wall run, slide, and shoot to your own beat using the in-game custom music editor, blasting through Frazzer’s armies!”

For the purposes of a fair review and complete openness, I’m a massive metal fan, Screaming vocals, whaling guitars and in that approaching sound in your head, that’s not to say I’m not also very eclectic with my taste, I also love some cheesy 80s pop and beautiful acoustic tunes, amongst others. I kind of draw the line with two genres (and one artist) now I’m 40 and doubt my opinion of them will ever change – dance Music and country music (with the odd exceptions like Pendulum and Johnny Cash).

So now, with that in mind, I’ll begin the review of Robobeat on PS5 from solo dev, Simon Fredholm and published by Kwalee. Robobeat is a FPS, mixed with a Rogue-like and rhythm-based title… that’s a lot to digest right there, am I right? No one can argue that the FPS’s gene hasn’t come a long way since their famous forefathers like Doom and Goldeneye, the massive popularity of Call Of Duty, especially in the 00s with Modern Warfare and Black Ops, cant be ignored.

The term Rogue-like comes from the 1980 game Rogue which used procedurally generated gameplay, not the first to use this (Beneath Apple Manor is considered the first and was released in 1978 for the Apple 2 computer). Every time a player started a new game, a whole new level would be generated at random, making every play through a different experience instead of standard linear story driven levels to complete. Rhythm-based games have been around for a long time now and everything from dance machines in arcades to Just Dance infecting many peoples Christmas Day on the Wii, like I know at some point, a lot of guy and gals my age lost a lot of time to Guitar Hero.

Well, Robobeat wants to combine all of the above. From the offset the music is very Dance/Drum & Bass a lot of the time and to start this off… I really did not enjoy that (imagine a very low brow on me as you read this, educational and instructional, bet you weren’t expecting that huh?) But hopefully the FPS element would rescue it in some way? About the rhythm element If you don’t like the music the rhythm is based on, are you going to enjoy playing a long to it anyway? We all got sick of some of our friends favourite Guitar Hero songs but now remember them with a warmth when you hear them. This game will not give you happy memories like that, the noises and bright colours are more likely to give you seizures of some kind if exposed to prolonged play.

Now the other most recent rhythm based FPS I have played is Metal Hellsing, released in September 2022 and now has a brilliant VR mode. That game released two years earlier is superior in everyway. I do question if the music, all of which is metal, as the title eludes, clouds my judgement on this but I actually enjoyed killing to the beat in that game.

In Robobeat you play as Ace a bounty Hunter tasked with bringing in an eccentric robot showman named Frazzer, chasing him down to his ever changing Techno Playground, you must fight to the beat of several different music tapes you find through out the levels or you unlocked, killing his army of robots. The beat keeper in this game kept falling out of sync, meaning no matter how good you are at keeping musical timings, no one will hit the weapons beat. This can happen due to problems with the sound being out of sync with your TV or the controller suffering input lag, there are many reasons it can happen and you can fix it by recalibrating like you did in Guitar Hero. It can be a bit tedious but  worth it if you are enjoying the game. There is another option that this game gives you… turning off the rhythm based element. Great – problem solved, right?

Not really because now you are left with a mediocre FPS/Rouge-like with terrible neon visuals, unrewarding gameplay, a story you don’t really care about and did I mention that terrible soundtrack I’ve read that people are putting their own songs in on PC and I’m not sure if you can do that on PS5 but even that wouldn’t save this game for me. All in all stay clear of this game, as I seriously can’t think of anything nice to say (and you know the saying)… I’m going to end this review.