Robobeat Review – Test Your Rhythm (PS5)

I think I’ve found my new favorite genre, that of the rhythm/action game. I recently got way into Hi-Fi-Rush and now I’ve instantly developed an addiction to this rollercoaster of a first-person shooter. There’s something to concentrating on keeping to the beat that makes getting into the flow state easier. It could just be speaking to the musician in me, giving me that feeling of jamming along to a song. And Robobeat does a fine job as jukebox.

Robobeat was developed by an indie company called Inzanity and published by Kwalee. The lead developer of Inzanity, Simon Fredholm, has a couple of indie platformers under his belt. Robotbeat is his first FPS and he nailed it. The controls are fluid, fast-paced, and satisfying but also malleable to the tempo of the songs you choose. Robobeat is not just a rogue-lite clone, it has mechanics unique to its style that meld with the core loop beautifully. It’s not just a gimmick applied to a generic template, they built the whole game up while considering how a rhythm-focused core loop would affect the gameplay. It’s quite impressive and well worth the ‘overwhelmingly positive’ score it has on Steam. Robobeat was released on Steam in May of 2024 but I’ve been reviewing the PS5 port coming out at the end of the month.

Robobeat is available on Steam for $19.99 and is coming to PS5 on the 31st of January.

Story – Not Exactly the Point

There is a story but it’s not exactly the point of Robobeat. It seems obvious that they started the development process with a core loop focus and then applied a story over the top. You’re a bounty hunter trapped in your latest target’s sadistic playground. Simple and easy enough to build a solid arcade-style rogue-lite around. Though the story isn’t exactly the focus, there is still a solid progression.

Progression

Robobeat is a rogue-lite, so each cycle is about going through a series of randomly chosen arenas where either enemies will appear or you’ll gain access to stuff like shops and upgrade rooms. When you die, you have to start from the beginning of your current stage. Each stage is unlocked by you fully completing the previous stage, which consists of multiple sections and bosses. You lose all the weapons from your previous run but you do find blueprints that unlock new weapons and utilities so the gameplay is constantly changing. You can always go back to previous levels to look for more blueprints or earn points to unlock new weapons. It blends the upgrade and level progression in a way that makes the game hard to put down. Every time I die, it’s so hard to stave off the thought ‘Ehh, just one more run’.

Every stage has multiple environments, making them quite long levels

Gameplay – Exactly the Point

The gameplay is by far the best feature of Robobeat. Not only is it a solid FPS with tight controls, weapon variety, and versatility of mechanics, but it’s also a solid rhythm game. Not only does it strive to provide great fast-paced shooting, it innovates by making everything fit in a rhythmic context. The only thing I would say it lacks compared to other shooters is that of enemy variety. So far, I’ve only encountered around ten unique enemy designs. But I find it difficult to care about this when I’m playing because there’s already so much to concentrate on.

There’s enough variety of enemies to keep it interesting.

You have to concentrate on using your weapons’ unique traits effectively, you gotta remember to use your utilities whenever they recharge, and you have to take advantage of what upgrades you’ve unlocked during the current run. You have to concentrate on your position, jumping, sliding, bouncing, dodging, parrying. And you have to do all of this in time to the beat of the music. With all this considered, the low enemy count seems more like a conscious decision rather than an oversight.

The battles are so exciting

Stick to the Beat

The most satisfying mechanic is of course the way it utilises rhythm. Everything you do in the game is accentuated by the beat. Shooting in time does more damage. You have to parry in time with the beat for it to be effective. Though you have increasingly better weapons as you progress through the game, the best weapon you’ll always have is your own rhythm. It’s as powerful as your skill in aiming. Which in an FPS means a lot.

One aspect I particularly like is that of how the weapon abilities play off of each other. You always have two guns on you, each mapped to the left and right trigger, and every gun has its own conditions and abilities. For instance, the pistol can be shot on every beat while the shotgun needs a beat cooldown with every shot. So if you have a pistol and shotgun, the most effective way to shoot is by alternating between them per beat. As a drummer, I love this.

It would’ve been so much more simple for them to make it with a single gun utilizing a single trigger but because it makes you alternate between hands, it feels like I’m practicing my rudiments in a more fun way than sitting there with a practice pad. Of course, it doesn’t exhaust all your talents as a drummer. It’s a game not a learning tool after all. But it does do a good job of exercising a skill that I know a lot of beginner to intermediate musicians struggle with.

If you slam into the ground then jump in quick succession, you bounce

A Great Tool for Improv Musicians

I’ve been meaning to write an article about how Hi-Fi Rush has made me a better musician but Robobeat does the same thing so I’ll abbreviate my point here. One of the hardest skills for a musician to master is that of being able to listen to music and play at the same time. You might think that’s what all musicians do and you’re right but there’s a big difference between playing to a song you’ve practiced a hundred times and playing to something you’ve never heard before and making it up on the spot.

This is improvisation and it’s one of the higher-ranking skills for any musician. Being able to concentrate fully on listening and have your body react to what the music is asking of you. You can learn thousands of beats, licks, fills, progressions, etc, but if you can’t jam to what other people are playing, you’re still an amateur in that regard.

There are cool parkour stages

Nothing is more off-putting than when you’re jamming and one of the people you’re playing with is playing as if they’re the only person in the band. This is a skill that games like Robobeat and Hi-Fi Rush can help with. Having to intently listen to the music while making snap decisions about things like what weapon to use, where to aim, who to shoot, when to parry, and so on, is just like deciding what beat or chord to play while jamming. Upon starting the game, I instantly recognized the feeling I was having was akin to jamming in a satisfying band. As a musician who prefers improv over memorization, this makes these rhythm-based action games infinitely more fun than something like Rock Band or Guitar Hero.

An Unexpected Delight

This is the first FPS I’ve played that I would prefer using the DualSense controller over mouse and keyboard. To soothe the rage of the PC purists, I too am in the camp that mouse and keyboard are superior in every way to controllers for FPS games. That being said, Robobeat does a couple of things that have shifted the scales for me. I mentioned before about the alternating between triggers when shooting your guns which is far more satisfying to me than alternating between left and right click. But the main reason I prefer using a controller is because Robobeat gives the player an option I have not seen in any console FPS other than Powerwash Simulator. You can turn on motion controls.

The bosses are quite susceptible to parrying

The DualSense motion controls are impeccable. The reason mouse is better than joystick for FPS gameplay is because you can do both big sweeping motions and intricate precise movement. Joysticks just don’t have that versatility so a mouse will always be the better decision. However, the implementation of motion controls means that you can dedicate the joystick to the big sweep motions while using the movement of the control to work on being precise. While I’ll admit that using a mouse probably still makes you a better player, using the DualSense is more exciting. Because this is a whole skill that I’ve never had the privilege of developing until now. I’ve been playing with mouse and keyboard my whole life, it’s nice to have an alternative that has the potential of being at least on par.

There’s a plethora of upgrades you can get that last to the end of each run

Graphics & Sound – A Rhythm Game Needs a Good Soundtrack

There’s not much to say about the graphics. In terms of aesthetics, it takes inspiration from the early Quake era. Each stage is built with rather basic geometry, with low-poly textures stretched out over everything. The enemy designs are blocky models that the PS1 wouldn’t struggle to render. This in no way is a detriment to the game. Sometimes it’s a little hard to see what you’re looking at during all the carnage but everything still functions perfectly fine. It’s just not exactly unique in any way.

Robobeat has explosive ping pong balls

The Cassettes

One point of contention I will make is the lack of variety in the music. It’s a rhythm-based game but there’s not much in terms of different sounds. There are a lot of different tracks, and you unlock more as you go along which I like. It was smart to have them be unlockable rather than just giving you the whole OST at the start. Because you can get excited about new tracks and grow attached to them rather than just picking them out of a list. But the tracks themselves don’t offer much variety.

For a rhythm game, you’d want there to be a plethora of different tempos and styles to choose from but there really isn’t. Every single track I’ve unlocked so far sits between 100-130BPM, except for one. There’s one track called Slow Down Buddy that’s quite slower than the rest and it’s my go-to because it’s the grooviest and most challenging. Every track has the same sort of feel to it as well. They’re all in that vague kind of high-octane heavy electronica with a punchy emphasis on the beat which is what you want for a rhythm/action game. But the variety in musical feel is quite lackluster. I hope I’m wrong and that I just need to unlock more cassettes.

Robobeat was reviewed on PS5 with a key provided by Kwalee.