Complex automation games usually aren’t my jam but then came along the demo for Rebots, a first-person automation-resource-management hybrid, with its endearing Adventure Time-style aliens and “wacky” personality, and I thought “Sure, why not?”
Expecting to be overwhelmed by a Shelob’s web of supply lines and too many “collect X amount of, like, sticks or something” requests clogging up my journal, I jumped in, and what I instead found was a jolly, funny, actually manageable management game about offloading menial craft ‘em up tasks to not-so-intelligent robot pals.
In Rebots, you work for the titular corporation that helps alien fellas relocate to small, procedurally generated asteroids floating about an endless space. The demo’s structure has you accepting quests and favors from the alien pals in a sort of town that serves as a hub base, before jumping into your caravan spaceship, jetting off to the abovesaid asteroids, and fulfilling their requests to move them in and make some cash in the process. You can then use that money to buy access to more explorable asteroid belts.
Most movers will ask you to prepare their rocky homes beforehand with very, err, specific visions in mind. One wanted their asteroid to be all trashy, with bugs flying about the place, leaving me to find an asteroid full of flies before making their eggs hatch into larvae. Others might ask you to deliver a certain amount of mushrooms or fruit, let’s say.
Sounds pretty dull, right? Right! But also wrong! Rebots requests are as mundane as they get, but the brain-twisting gameplay comes in via the tools you have. You can summon helpful robots to take care of the chores for you. My demo session, which lasted a little over an hour, included a big supervisor bot and as many little helper bots as you could afford with your limited energy.
You could theoretically pick up a mushroom, run toward the mailbox, and repeat the cycle ten times to fulfil a mover’s request. But with a helper robot on hand, you can point a remote at the bot to make it do the work for you. But instead of commanding the robot to repeat that cycle manually, you can even offload your managerial duties to the big guy.
If you place the bulkier supervisor bot next to a pile of mushrooms, for example, and then mess around with its settings, all the little helper bots in its vicinity will forage. Or mine, if you’re next to an ore deposit. Or chop down trees, and so on. Then, you can connect the supervisor bot to a mailbox or your ship’s storage, and vice versa, which will make the helpers follow the connection and take resources back and forth.
The demo’s selection of missions doesn’t make things too much more complicated than that, though Rebot’s most recent trailer threatens with sights of dozens of robos scurrying between multiple waypoints, so I’m excited to see things get increasingly unwieldy when the game releases sometime later this year.
If you’re just as scared by big numbers and complicated automation processes as I am, that trailer might be a little bit of a jumpscare, but worry not! What I played of Rebots made the act of automating stuff remarkably straightforward and easily understandable, especially since you’re working on relatively small rocks. The robot wheel (kinda like a weapon wheel) has space for plenty more robot variants that I haven’t seen yet, though I can’t imagine they’ll muddy such cleanly built management systems.
My only real problem with the Rebots demo was that, because quests sometimes ask you for asteroids that house orangos, for example, you can spend a boring amount of time clicking to travel to new locations, running about looking for an orango tree, only to leave when all you find is merryberry trees, or something.
Even in the instances where I came across an empty rock, I was still having a great time with Rebots, partly because it looks great and the characters are just so attractively off-putting, but also because it gives you so many options. Not in the mood to complete missions? Here’s a scanner - go scan stuff to fill out journal entries. Or you can spend as much time as you want meeting the town’s inhabitants, which seems like a location that’ll just balloon as you help more and more aliens. One quest-giver wanted me to deliver fruit so they could open a store, so I’m pretty sure it’s an area that’ll expand and open the door to new possibilities too. Either way, Rebot’s endearing cast and simplified bot-commanding tools have me itching to get even deeper into its processes. Who knows? I might finally enjoy creating supply lines that look like ant marches.
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