Meet the Robinsons

The next game on the hit list is a movie tie-in game for a movie I’ve never seen and now having played the game, I most likely never will. I have decided to have a go at putting a walkthrough together for this as I ended up having to do a nearly full second playthrough due to one of the missable achievements that caused me to have a rage blackout. It’s only fair to try and save other gamers from the same fate.

Meet the Robinsons follows the story of Wilbur Robinson whose MO appears to be using a time machine to travel back in time and take pictures of himself with characters from history. The game starts with a prologue in ancient Egypt where you escape from a collapsing temple and effectively alter history. I really had to work hard to swallow the time travel liberties in the game. While I understand it’s a kid’s movie, I don’t see that as a genuine reason to trash the place with a poor time travel premise.

Anyway, the idea of the game is that the timeline gets corrupted when Wilbur goes back in time and as the player, your job is to spend 75% of the game fixing it. The whole story makes very little sense and throw in the time travel issues and it becomes simply terrible.

Gameplay wise, it’s shockingly bad. The control interface is one of the worst I’ve encountered in a long time. What I found to be bizarre was the fact that there is no jump button. Wilbur gets over obstacles by walking into them. This does make level navigation simpler, but I still thought it was a bizarre choice. As you play the game, you pick up various weapons and utilities to use against enemies and these get assigned to the Y, B and X buttons. The aiming function is where the game becomes shit. You can auto-lock on using the LB button but you won’t lock on to anything you want to aim at. You can also do manual aiming by holding down LT and pressing the button that corresponds to the weapon you want to use. I found it hit and miss whether this worked and when it did, it was incredibly fiddly and not user friendly.

In addition to the above, there are three vehicle sections that involve you getting into a giant ball and rolling through a course. The ball handles badly too so at least it’s consistent. These also have course records attached to them and if you beat the record you get some kind of reward. I only did this once on my second playthrough so I’m not sure what the rewards were. The times are essentially doing a perfect run so it makes no sense to have these as you only get one attempt per playthrough and you need to learn the course to do it well. And even then, it’s still luck-based.

Luck sums it up quite nicely when you look at the difficulty of the game. It’s not overly difficult and it feels as though it’s done to account for the sloppy gameplay – and the amount of luck you will need to get through it.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 38 Achievements

Another problem with the game is that there are a lot of collectibles and a lot of sections of the game that cannot be revisited once you’ve cleared them. Due to this, there are 14 missable achievements. Two of these are for scanning 130 objects throughout a playthrough and completing all 16 Havoc puzzles. Neither of these have any trackers so you won’t know if you done them all unless you keep a record of what you’ve done.

This is where I came unstuck as I had missed one of the Havoc puzzles due to some uncharacteristically poor tracking on my part, but lessons learned for the future.

The achievements can be broken down into three categories; mini games, main story and collectibles. Some achievements are tied to each other in that you have to collect VR discs to play against certain characters in the chargeball minigame – a fairly horrendous block-breaker game. Aside from getting all the collectibles to unlock the characters, you then need to play them. You play two games as part of the story – one tutorial which shows you how it works and one against ‘The Champ’ which is an overly long 3-match series. Apparently if you don’t win this match, you can’t rematch him without starting again but I don’t know what happens if you lose.

The rest of the matches can be played in the minigames sub menu once you’ve collected the relevant VR discs. The matches themselves are pretty easy and if you play on the tutorial level, you only have to play one game to get a win.

The other side of the mini-games involves playing a game called Security System which is a shooting gallery. There are two achievements tied to playing this which essentially require you to get 100,000 points. This is also easy. It was the first thing I did in the game and I breezed through it without really knowing what I was doing.

So that just leaves the collectibles. The scans are easy enough – just scan everything and eventually it will unlock. There is some leeway here as there are closer to 150 individual scans throughout the game and you only need 130. While I said there isn’t a tracker, two other items are obtained by scanning 100 and 110 things so you at least will know when you are nearly finished.

The last achievement I’ll talk about is the Havoc puzzles. There are 16 of them in the game and they are 2D puzzles where you navigate to an exit while avoiding ants and rocks and blowing stuff up. The controls here are no better than the main game and when it requires you be fast, you will likely fail several times because of the controls.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Having to play Meet the Robinsons twice was an episode in sheer frustration but I have no one to blame but myself for that. The controls will live in the memory for being a massive failure and the game is generally quite ugly. That said, my second playthrough took less than 6 hours and it’s probably anywhere between 8 to 10 hours to get the full completion. It’s not worth replaying.