Bionic Dues Pre-Alpha Preview

I was lucky to enough to get an appointment with Arcen Games in the Indie Megabooth at PAX 2013. Erik Johnson, PR extraordinary, walked me through an indulgently long hands-on demo with their futuristic roguelike game Bionic Dues. Dungeon crawling, customizing robots, turn-based combat, and rampant robot invasions? It was easy to get excited about this game in the buzz of the expo floor.

Erik revealed that Bionic Dues will be available for early access on Steam in October and was nice enough to give Dorkadia a pre-alpha release. After spending some time with this early version of Bionic Dues can I say that this is it the robot-building roguelike we’ve been waiting for?

What Works

The premise of Bionic Dues is wonderful. Humans are losing a war against a tide of rampant robots. You’ve been conscripted as an exo driver, exos being the large robots humans use to fight back, by the corporate army protecting one of the last human cities in order to pay off your bionic body parts. (Hence the title “Bionic Dues”.) Through some seriously bad luck, you’re the last exo pilot in an overrun metropolis and it’s your job to save it. You have 50 days (50 missions) before an enormous robot army arrives on your door step. Failure means certain death.

You’ll use your 50 missions to explore the dangerous city, upgrade your robots with found loot, and take the bad guy’s strength down a peg before your inevitable confrontation with the massive robot army. Each mission is a tactical turn based affair where you pilot one of your four specialized exos at a time (you can swap in and out at any time) to accomplish a variety of mission goals like destroying guarded machinery or rummaging for as much gear as possible. The game is transparent about the threat that’s coming when the doomsday clock hits zero; it proudly displays the number and strength of incoming robots, inching (sometimes rocketing!) upwards every passing day.

This larger X-COM-like context is a fun idea. Shifting the notoriously brutal roguelike consequences from character death to losing an arms race with a robot army sounds radical. It’s also a whole lot more story than most roguelike players get which won’t go unappreciated.

What Doesn’t

Unfortunately, the strategic element is the best part of Bionic Dues. This pre-alpha doesn’t just lack polish, which is to be expected. It also lacks the complexity, balance, UI, and loot systems that would make the game an exciting and rewarding experience.

Within just the first few hours of playing, about 10 missions, I had already devised a strategy that the game couldn’t overcome. I fitted every one of my exos with range extending and damage boosting mods. Bionic Due’s “1 for 1” action economy is rarely futzed with: firing a weapon translates into all of the enemies moving exactly 1 square. Most of the enemies I fought had a range of 5 or 6 squares while I was topping 10 or 11. Every mission would boil down to me getting the attention of the surrounding enemies (using the in-game “whistle” ability) and shooting them one by one as they marched in single file towards me down a corridor. In the rare case that a robot took multiple hits to kill, they usually only took a second or third. Because my range beat out theirs by up to 5 squares I had plenty of time to wear down even the toughest enemy into dust before they could fire a shot.

On the off chance enemies were going to overwhelm me because I couldn’t use the limited AI to file them down a hallway, I would use my boosted rockets to vaporize every normal enemy and knock off about 2/3 of the health of any boss in one hit. This single-file-murder-hallway-with-occasional-megarocket tactic was an easy trump card that didn’t require any finesse. Even as the game introduced new robots, the only way I could conceivably lose was to somehow run out of ammo. And that’s awful.

Since your robots don’t “level up” automatically the equipment you find is (nearly) your sole source of advancement. Sadly, the equipment lacks the variety necessary to keep upgrades interesting. By the end of my time with Bionic Dues I was completing whole missions (missions specifically about getting gear) and not receiving a single meaningful upgrade for any of my four exos. This might have been due to me having little use for the more esoteric upgrades, like health regeneration or mine laying, since my bullet+hallway strategy was unbeatable.

Many missions require you to double-back on the randomly generated maps to destroy points of interest, find treasure, or to end a successful mission. The ability to quickly move to explored parts of the map doesn’t exist; holding down the WASD keys is your only option. Nearly every mission ended with me holding down a single movement key watching my robot slowly glide through empty room after empty room. Hopefully a “click to move” feature is implemented soon.

The bottom line: I spent a few hours sluggishly completing missions that weren’t very fun to get loot that I usually didn’t need. And then I got to watch the incoming doomsday army get stronger because a day went by. Sigh.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Bionic Due’s strange tone. A robot apocalypse is looming over your city of millions and you’re the only one that can do anything about it. If you fail, the corporation will nuke the city instead of letting its resources fall into the hands of the robot menace. This is a serious story, but the game’s writing sounds like it belongs in an Invader Zim episode. Tooltips often attempt snarky humor (with mixed results) that obscures the vital mechanical information I need to play the game. The one-two punch of an out of place irreverent voice and game-relevant details being buried in piles of exposition soured me quickly.

Credit Where Credit is Dues

Because Bionic Dues is in pre-alpha I want to be as sensitive to the game’s potential as I am critical of its shortcomings. While I can’t say that the gameplay kept me interested the futuristic roguelike that has strategic elements is mouth watering. Major attention needs to be paid to the reward systems, challenge levels, complexity, and presentation if that potential is going to be reached. Even those new to the genre are going to find the game’s offerings meager and repetitive.

But I strongly feel that this game is still worth bringing to your attention. I interpret Erik’s excitement and devotion to Bionic Dues as a sign that the state of this alpha isn’t going to reflect the final product. They’ve set their sites on making a large scale tactical robotic game that will last years, I’m eager to see if they succeed.

Early access Bionic Dues will be available soon on Steam. Do I suggest buying in? If you’re slavering for a futuristic robot dungeon crawler, then these guys are ready to (hopefuly) turn your dollars into the game of your dreams. But I’m choosing to withhold my money and instead carefully watch this game, crossing my fingers that a truly epic robot roguelikes grows from this as of yet unimpressive sprout.