Bugatron Review

While I was pleased with Retro64's title "Cosmo Bots", I certainly cannot say the same for Bugatron. It plays like Galaga and other games of that sort, except much worse.

With very slow movement on the part of your spaceship, you move back and forth and shoot weird spaceships, etc. Nothing new here at all. There are very few special weapons, that is, if you can even get them at all. Even if you do manage to get a special weapon, they are fairly useless and unimaginatve. These include bullets that fire in the direction you are moving, which is totally useless and defies the point of the game (to shoot up), and then also a wrecking ball attachment, which only swings when you move side to side, and furthermore, is useless against enemies that usually stay out of reach.

After brutally failing for the third time, I stopped playing the game, only to find I had made the leaderboard.

"I made the leaderboard with only 8500 points? That' can't be right!"

But alas, it was right. It's pretty absurd when the highest score on a video game (presumably the developers') was only 8000... and that was only the beginner/trail version levels. I would hate to see how mind-numbingly irritating the harder levels get.

Bugatron is an instance where a simple, 2D graphic game from two decades ago still outshines the newer, shinier version. Galaga didn't need 3D graphics, especially fairly poor ones. I was far more impressed with Retro64's 2D enemies in Cosmo Bots, which also borrowed some ideas from other games, but at least Cosmo Bots made some unique changes and had an addictive factor to it.

Bugatron, on the other hand, left me scratching my head and asking, "Why??"

Why indeed. Why did they make this? Why did I waste my time with it? Why isn't the game more visually attractive? Why are power-ups so lame and hard to come by? Why can't I earn extra lives after defeating X number of enemies?

Most of all, why take a golden concept and ruin it?

For some people, this might be enjoyable, but for those people I say... just go and get Galaga, for Pete's sake.

Avoid this game like the plague.