INTRO:
Puppy Games is an aspiring indie game developer that actually started operating way back as early as 2001. It was not only until recently (at this time of writing) that they have achieved a greater profile.
Research into Puppy Games’ chronology of games is quite difficult, short of actually contacting the indie game-maker itself. However, Ultratron should be the earliest game that it has published, and it has been worked over the years.
Unfortunately, although the game may have been worked on for years, its current build at this time of writing still has many design issues.
PREMISE:
It has to be said here that the premise of the game is ultimately just an excuse to throw a whole bunch of angry enemies at the player to shoot at.
If one deems to know more about the premise, it is a simple trope: the human race has been all but rendered extinct by an uprising of robots. The last human has decided that if he/she could not beat them, he/she would join them – with the caveat that an upgradeable droid body would help him/her exact terrible vengeance on the robots.
Apparently, with the droid body, the human has managed to breach the computing facilities of the robots, with the intent of killing their processing cores.
CONTROLS:
By default, the keyboard and mouse are used to control the human-cum-droid (henceforth referred to as just “the droid”).
The WSAD keys are used to shuffle it about, while the mouse is used to aim at the general direction that it is shooting at. Alternatively, the player could use a controller, which is just as well because the game is technically a twin-stick shoot-‘em-up.
Anyway, the movement controls are quite responsive, as are those for shooting (at least until the player obtains the highest power grade of the droid’s gun; there will be more elaboration on this later).
DROID CAPABILITIES & UPGRADES - OVERVIEW:
The droid has several tools for its use in its assault on the robots’ nexus. These are depicted on its very simply-drawn sprite. These tools can be upgraded from level to level, which happen to change their appearance (or at least the appearance of an associated part on the droid).
DROID “POWER”:
The most apparent tool that the droid has is its “gun”, which looks like an overly large tuning fork. In-game, it is called “Droid Power”, supposedly because the gun draws its ammunition from the droid itself. That “Droid Power” upgrades happen to change the cosmetic appearance of the droid’s head would strongly support this impression.
Anyway, the gun can fire unlimited shots, which can travel rather quickly. Despite these advantages, the game has a few designs in place to discourage the player from simply firing all the time; these will be described later.
For almost all levels of Droid Power, fired shots travel reliably straight towards where the player’s cursor is.
Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the maximum level of Droid Power somehow reduces the accuracy of the shots. They stray from the player’s cursor by several degrees.
An apologist can argue that the straying makes it a lot easier to deal with swathes of enemy robots, which do appear much more often late into the game. However, it can be an issue if the player is trying to hit a specific part of a boss robot.
Most importantly, the gun’s shots do not appear to have consistent visual qualities to them. At some levels of Droid Power, the shots may seem hexagonal, while at some others, they resemble wide rectangles. Their colors and particle effects also vary tremendously.
Of course, one could argue that such changes should not be posing problems when they are merely cosmetic. However, when coupled with the power-up of bouncy bullets, the ricocheting shots can be difficult to differentiate from the shots that enemy robots fire – which happens to change in color from level to level.
SHIELDS:
Shields are practically the droids’ hitpoints. If the player runs out of these, the droid can only take one more hit before exploding spectacularly. As the player dodges enemy fire when being a figurative inch away from death’s door, a warning klaxon blares and the shield counter flashes red repeatedly. These are obnoxious reminders that the player is just a step away from a game-over.
There are very few ways to replenish shields. The most appreciable method is through picking up power-ups, specifically one of which that restores a shield for free. However, these power-ups are rare.
The more common way is to simply purchase them from the Omni-Corp store, which appears after the completion of every level. Yet, every subsequent shield point becomes more expensive; the player will have to consider hoarding the cash for actual upgrades instead of replenishing shields.
For better or worse, there is no moment of invulnerability when the droid takes a hit and loses a shield. If the player carelessly runs into a cluster of incoming shots, the droid will take all of them and lose a shield for each shot. Dodging them is easier said than done, due to problems that arise from the game’s psychedelic visuals that will be elaborated later.
“SMARTBOMBS”:
The phrase “smartbomb” that is used in Ultratron is perhaps intended as homage to shoot-‘em-up titles of yore.
Ultratron’s smartbomb works much like the smartbombs of those games. When activated, they wipe out a lot of enemies in its radius of effect; the game rationalizes this occurrence as an EMP burst that originates from the droid.
The player can only have three smartbombs, but these are items that are so rare and precious that the player is unlikely to have a full capacity at any time; nasty encounters will eventually force the player to expend them.
(Smartbombs happen to be especially effective against bosses, because they have happen to hit all of their parts for considerable damage.)
Smartbombs can be obtained either from power-ups that “Spidroids” drop (more on these later), or bought from the Omni-Corp store. The latter may seem to be a reliable source, but the game discourages regular replenishing by increasing the price of the smartbomb each time that it is purchased. This is a clever limitation.
BOOST:
One of the most important abilities that the droid has does not come around until after the player has gone through a certain number of levels.
Indeed, most of the other abilities that the droid can have that have not been mentioned here already require the player to have completed multiple levels. The ability to “boost” is the earliest to be unlocked – and for good reason.
“Boosting” is the act of drastically increasing the droid’s movement speed for a short period of time. The player still has to control the droid with the movement inputs though, so boosting can seem a bit difficult at first.
More importantly, the default effects of boosting are not of much use, because the player may well get out of hot water and into the frying pan, to cite a saying.
However, once the player obtains the “Quantum Shift” upgrade, booting becomes next-to-indispensable. With the upgrade, the droid can boost past enemy fire and even enemies. This is very convenient when fighting bosses, which are immense enemies.
GRENADE LAUNCHER:
The grenade launcher would have been a powerful addition to the droid’s weaponry, if not for its lack of ease of use.
Before the player can fire grenades, he/she has to wait for a meter that represents the readiness of the munitions to fill up. This would have been an acceptable balancing design if it had been the only one for the grenade launcher.
The problem with the grenade launcher is that the player must hold down the fire button to shoot it off. This also means that the player would be shooting at what the player wants blown up already, which inadvertently makes the grenade launcher quite useless because it would be detonating amongst enemies that have already been thinned out.
An independent control input to launch grenades would have been appreciated.
PETS:
So-called “pets” are some of the most nuanced assets that the player can have, but they make a terrible first impression. Despite Ultratron being a shoot-‘em-up title, the pets are nothing like the satellites or drones that are seen in other titles in the genre.
When activated, these “pets”, which are really small (but well-armed) robots, follow the droid about in a short conga line. The pets are indestructible, but if they are hit, they get stunned and are left behind. They do absolutely nothing but hop on the spot while calling out for help, so if the player wants to recover the firepower that they contribute to the party, the player must have the droid saunter over to retrieve them.
That the pets have their own hitboxes also make them unsuitable for high score runs, because the player’s score multiplier is reset whenever either the droid or pets are hit.
Anyway, the main purpose of the pets is to augment the droid with additional firepower. However, this additional firepower is under the autonomous control of the pets. They will pick their own targets, generally the nearest one that is within their scanner range.
Speaking of scanner range, the robot pets can only target enemies within their scanner range, and they need time to lock onto a target.
Initially, the pets are practically short-sighted and slow creatures. The Blaster pet has a pitifully short scanner, and the Rocket and Laser pet take a long time to aim.
Indeed, they start out so useless that they are just not worth the opportunity cost of having spent hard-earned money on them instead of something else that is more immediately reliable. The player is better off purchasing other things, such as Droid Power and Boost upgrades.
Eventually though, the player will run out of other upgrades to purchase, and the only way to increase the droid’s firepower is by investing in the pets. These (very expensive) investments increase their scanner range, aiming speed and rate of fire, eventually making them a lot more reliable.
Interestingly, the damage upgrades for the robot pets are implemented through a system of kill tallies; this system has to be unlocked via a purchase first. This system is not unlike the “experience” systems that had been seen in games with RPG elements.
There does not appear to be limits to the “experience” levels of the pets, which make them all the more important to have in the post-ending gameplay (which will be elaborated later).
DRONES:
In addition to pets, the player might be able to obtain a turret that mimics the droid’s fire.
The drone is practically a sentry turret that is utterly immobile. Unlike the pets, it is not indestructible. This can seem to make the drone even more of a liability than pets are.
The droid can pick up the drone and reposition it elsewhere where it is a lot safer, but this is not a good design that balances the drone’s vulnerabilities. Repositioning the drone would take time and attention away from actively dodging and pre-empting enemies, as well as picking up the precious dots that they drop.
The only reason that a player may have for keeping a drone around is that it duplicates the firepower that the droid can produce.
By default, it is only programmed to fire when the droid fires and it fires at a direction that is parallel to the droid’s own direction of fire. This is not the most ideal of default designs; the drone’s firepower could have been more effective if it is directed at where the player is aiming.
Upgrades for the drone are quite useless if the player does not have one. They are not very good upgrades either. One of them grants aiming autonomy to the drone, which is not always desirable, especially if the player wants to directly control its firing. One of the other upgrades is at least useful, because it restores the shields of the drone by one point for every level that the player passes, but again, it is only a worthwhile purchase if the player can actually keep the drones alive.
The most significant problem about the drone is how it is obtained. It can only spawn if the player can retrieve a drone power-up, the appearance of which is a matter that depends on the player’s luck.
DOTS & OMNI-CORP STORE:
All enemies drop what appears to be blinking orbs when they are destroyed; the game refers to these objects as “dots”. The player should endeavour to pick them up, because they grant much needed money when retrieved.
Unfortunately, the game does not make it easy to pick them up. Firstly, most of them are small and sometimes difficult to see against the neon of the backgrounds; they are only more reliably visible when they appear against the wholly black sections of the floor. They do blink and bob about, but the animations for these could have been more rapid so as to make them even easier to spot.
The dots eventually disappear, if the player is not fast enough to pick them up. Initially, the window of opportunity may seem too small; some dots – and “some”, because not all of them share the same durations of existence – can disappear after just several seconds.
The droid can attract nearby dots towards it, but this feature, which should have been an inherent design for the purpose of user-friendliness, is worked into the game as an actual gameplay tool. The player must spend precious money to upgrade the droid’s dot-vacuuming range.
The dots can even appear outside of the arena if the player kills enemies that are too close to the periphery of the level area. If the player does not upgrade the droid’s “Dot Slurper” tool (the name for which is obvious homage to Pac-Man), the player forfeits these dots.
The dots can also be trapped in places that the droid cannot reach without suffering harm. For example, they may be in spots where fresh enemy reinforcements suddenly come in. This makes Boost – and its Quantum Shift upgrade - virtually mandatory purchase choices (though they are definitely worth the costs).
If there is any user-friendliness to be had with the dots, it is that the more precious dots are a lot larger.
The money that the player has obtained from dots (and certain other sources that will be described later) can be spent in between levels. During this interval, the droid can somehow access Omni-Corp’s store to purchase upgrades.
(For players who are not already ardent followers of Puppy Games, the significance of “Omni-Corp” only becomes apparent in later games.)
The store is functional, but it has a few issues about user-friendliness. One of these is that the player cannot obtain tool-tip pop-ups from the purchase options that are still locked. The player will have to fulfill the prerequisites to unlock these options for purchase before this can happen.
At least the level requirements for certain options are shown. Not all purchase options are available from the start; the player has to complete a number of levels before some become unlocked, and said number happens to be conveniently shown on the labels for the options.
Unfortunately, other prerequisites are not so clearly labelled. For example, the game does not inform the player that he/she has to purchase the leftmost option in a row before the other options in the same row become unlocked.
REGULAR ENEMIES:
The game introduces pitifully slow and weak enemies at the start. Indeed, the first few levels are so much easier than the rest of the game, what with enemies that take so long to consider their next move and actually have a delay in their responses.
Eventually though, the game increases the alacrity of enemies, in addition to arming them in increasing magnitude. More types of enemies are also introduced, often with different attack patterns and behaviour.
However, different enemies may not look different enough from each other. For example, a small grunt robot with a blaster may have one additional eye, compared to another small grunt robot that looks similar but is actually unarmed. There is not any clearer visual difference, such as the former looking like it has a gun.
On the other hand, this slight difference may have been deliberate, because these grunts are often spawned within the same group.
Such lack of aesthetic contrast between enemy robots may have been intentional, i.e. the developers intended this to make the game more difficult. However, this is perhaps to the detriment of the game because it can be considered as hurting the user-friendliness of Ultratron.
Considering that the game will throw many types of enemies at the player and in seemingly random permutations every time a player re-attempts the same one level, being able to quickly differentiate between enemies by merely looking at them would have been very much appreciated.
If the player can somehow learn to quickly recognize different types of robots from the abovementioned visual designs, the player might be able to appreciate the challenge that they pose.
For example, the player will eventually learn to knock out turrets first. This is because the slower that an enemy is, the more firepower that it has; it so happens that immobile ones have lots more. Another example is that the player eventually learns to keep away from enemies with shields, which simply absorb incoming shots without taking any damage.
Most enemies will attempt to get closer to the droid while shooting away (if they are armed). However, some others simply mill about, taking potshots when they can. For example, there is a robot that will roam about the periphery of the arena at high speeds, while firing blasters if the droid gets too close.
As mentioned earlier, vanquished enemies drop dots close to where they perish. This means the player cannot always take advantage of the droid’s long range of fire to keep away from harm. The player must have the droid saunter over to where enemies perish, or otherwise have the droid stay uncomfortably close to enemies in order to pick up the dots as soon as possible.
This limitation also discourages the player from firing indefinitely, because he/she might unwittingly kill enemies that are too far away for the player to reach their dots in time.
NERFROIDS & SPIDROIDS:
In addition to regular enemies, there are robots known as Nerfroids and Spidroids. Unlike other enemies, their presence is announced beforehand via visual indicators that appear at the points on the periphery of the arena; these show where they would come from.
Spidroids are spider-shaped robots that speed through the arena very quickly, releasing dots as it goes. If the player can knock it out before it leaves, it releases a random power-up. The power-up stays a lot longer in the arena than dots do, but they eventually disappear as well.
The Spidroid generally moves in a straight line, but if it encounters an enemy by sheer chance, it will turn, possibly moving out of the area earlier than it would have if it travelled straight. This can be aggravating, if the player had been expecting to obtain a power-up from the Spidroid.
(It has to be mentioned here that colliding with a Spidroid is considered to be the same as colliding with regular enemies, so intercepting it with the droid is not a good idea.)
Nerfroids are the exact opposite of Spidroids. Instead of dropping goodies, they drop things that would punish the unsuspecting player (and those who do not read the text displays that scrawl over the bottom left of the screen; there will be more on this later). Picking any of the skull-shaped psychedelically-colored icons immediately removes a shield.
If the player destroys the Nerfroid, it leaves behind a “power-up” with an ominous skull symbol, also with the same psychedelic neon colours. This is of course a warning. Yet, inexperienced players may be duped into picking it up anyway, no thanks to the presence of another power-up that also happens to have a skull symbol.
This power-up is actually an EMP bomb. Picking it up causes a temporary but very undesirable de-buff on the droid. If the player does not pick it up, it will explode after a while, mimicking a smartbomb that also happens to damage the droid if it is nearby. Moreover, the bomb actually destroys any dots in its radius of effect and also prevents affected enemy robots from dropping dots.
Even if the player stays away while it persists, the bomb remains a hazard. It deflects any shots that hit it; deflected shots are dangerous to the player character. This is especially so if the player has the power-up of bouncy shots; deflected shots can be hard to differentiate from these. There are subtle visual differences between these, but they could have been more obvious.
CHALLENGE STAGES:
Every three levels or so, the level ends with a “challenge stage”. There are two variants of the challenge stage, one more aggravating than the other.
The less aggravating one has the player shooting away at swarms of Spidroids that do not drop any power-ups. This challenge would be easy enough for most experienced players, especially if they have upgraded pets to shoot any targets that the droid has missed.
The other variant has the player dodging Nerfroids, which is easier said than done. Pets and drones become a liability in this challenge; any Nerfroid that bumps into them counts against the player’s performance. This challenge also very much necessitates the use of Boost. Even so, dodging the erratic Nerfroids can be difficult. The game also randomizes their spawning rates.
At later levels, dodging the Nerfroids is as much a matter of luck as it is a matter of skill.
After completing – or rather, surviving – a challenge, the player is scored according to his/her performance at achieving its goal. Achieving perfect performance grants the player bonus cash, so there is an incentive to do well.
On the other hand, the game could have been more generous by scaling cash rewards according to performance instead of a bonus for perfection.
BOSSES:
Every ten levels, the player has to fight a boss. The boss does not appear immediately though; there will be waves of regular enemies, perhaps even a Spidroid and a Nerfroid, that spawn before the boss does.
The problem here is that there is no clear warning on when the boss would come in, and it comes in towards the centre of the arena astonishingly fast. The most that the player could do to avoid being hit by the incoming boss is to avoid the centre until it comes in.
As to be expected of the bosses, they are huge and heavily armed, in addition to appearing to float. Bosses threaten the player not just with their considerable firepower, but their massive girth too. More often than not, they attempt to wedge the player character into a nook and then move in to crush the droid. Furthermore, because the droid does not benefit from anything such as a moment of invulnerability, as mentioned earlier, getting crushed all but spells doom for the player.
The bosses can only be destroyed by destroying their exterior body parts, which also happen to be their weapons. Therefore, ostensibly, the player can reduce their amount of firepower – or rather, variety of firepower - as he/she whittles its durability down. However, the bosses will compensate by increasing their firing rates.
This puts an onus on the player to consider which parts to prioritize first. She/he may want to remove the more troublesome weapons, such as rocket pods, before the rest, for example. However, the bosses tend to have additional weapons that are only revealed when their first set has been mostly eliminated, so the player may have to memorize what they would do if he/she could not defeat them the first time around.
The crushing habits of the bosses and the need for pin-point fire happen to render any drones that the player has to be quite useless by the time they saunter over. The bosses are more than likely to just move over them, which rapidly damages and destroys them.
Defeating the bosses scatter a lot of dots all over the place; this may seem like a good reward. However, if the player has neglected the Dot Slurper and Boost upgrades, he/she would be dismayed to realize that the dots are just too far apart to be collected in time.
CHECKPOINTS:
After completing any boss level, the game creates a “checkpoint”, which is practically a single-slot game-save that is overwritten anytime that the player re-attempts and completes the same boss level again (which requires the player to start from a preceding checkpoint).
These checkpoints also happen to maintain the player’s score, but not the score multiplier from completing levels without the droid or its pets/drones taking a scratch. Still, checkpoints are very handy if the player is trying to rake in the high-scores and travel up the leaderboards (which is tracked in any build of the game – DRM or no).
POST-GAME:
If the player is to have any care for it, then he/she would know that the game’s excuse for a story ends after level 40. Any level afterwards is hereby referred to as the “post-game” experience, where the only goal is to go through as many levels as possible and rake in the scores.
It is not certain whether these post-game levels have been pre-designed or are procedurally generated. Every set of 10 levels appear to follow consistent neon color schemes, boss permutations and types of challenge stages, but these are the only things that are certain.
In the post-game experience, the pets become more important than they were in the first 40 levels, if only because the player would have run out of more worthwhile purchase options. The player would not have a choice but to invest in pets in order to increase his/her available firepower.
Indeed, pets will not only be needed for their firepower in order to deal with the increasingly more numerous enemies (which may possibly be increasingly tougher too), but also needed for their autonomous targeting. More often than not, enemy reinforcements spawn in where the player is not aiming, and they may pursue the droid at too fast a speed for the player to respond quickly without letting whatever he/she was aiming at get away; the pets, with upgrades, can protect the player from these attacks.
VISUAL DESIGNS:
Many issues with the visual designs of the game have already been mentioned earlier in this review. Unfortunately, there are several more to mention.
Puppy Games has decided to go for simply-shaped, blocky sprites to many things in Ultratron, with pixels and possibly voxels filling up the rest of the technical aspects of the graphics. These designs would be pleasing to the eyes of players who appreciate “retro” looks.
However, when it comes to lighting and colours, Puppy Games may not have made wise decisions.
There is plenty of neon lighting in the game. Players who are not used to such gaudy and glaring light sources may have to be warned here. Otherwise, the neon lighting may seem to appropriately fit the exciting electronic music (most of which is techno), thus creating a psychedelic impression.
Yet, as mentioned earlier, the neon lighting sometimes interferes with the gameplay. For one, the neon lighting for the background could have been enough if it is just limited to the periphery of the arena, but sometimes it emanates from the floor too. This is when it might mingle together with the neon lighting of enemy fire, and it so happens that the latter is of the same matching color.
Puppy Games uses black in all of the sprites for the robots, the droid and its followers. This would not have been an issue, if not for the fact that much of the arena floor is black as well.
Of course, one can argue that the sprites have outlines and trims that are of a colour that is not black, so their silhouettes do not simply blend into the floor. However, recognizing silhouettes would have been easier if the sprites had more colour contrast.
Speaking of contrast, most of it would be provided by, unsurprisingly, neon lighting on the sprites themselves. Some examples of this have been mentioned earlier, such as the different numbers of glowing eyes on different robots.
Indeed, it may appear as if the game resorts to the differences in neon lighting between the sprites to differentiate between different types of robots. The more troublesome a robot is, the more neon lighting its sprite has. The bosses in particular have the most lighting.
Being Puppy Games’ first title, the stuttering animations for some of the sprites may be forgivable. In fact, they may have been deliberate too, especially considering that some other sprites slide smoothly across the screen (especially those for the Spidroids and Nerfroids).
Translucent labels appear next to the droid to indicate which power-ups that it has. It may take a while for the player to know which label refers to which power-up, but the labels are distinct enough to allow the player to eventually learn.
The most ineffective visual design in the game happens to be one that was intended for user-friendliness, unfortunately.
There are notifications for important events, such as the appearance of Nerfroids, but these notifications appear as scrolling text at the bottom left of the screen – which the player would barely be looking at because he/she would be pre-occupied with occurrences that are happening elsewhere on-screen.
The worst visual designs in the game are the visual effects for screen distortion and "stroboscopics". Screen distortion randomly mimics the screen-stuttering effects in malfunctioning CRT monitor displays, whereas "stroboscopics" causes the red-green-blue (RGB) layers of colours to tear apart when the droid takes damage.
Both effects are terrible to watch, especially when the player is fighting off enemies and is trying to make purchase decisions in the Omni-Corp store. Fortunately, both can be turned off.
(For better or worse, Puppy Games seems to be so enamored with these effects that they appear in their later games too.)
AUDIO DESIGNS:
As had been mentioned earlier, much of the music of the game is electronic, with techno dominating most of the tracks. Some of them can be very catchy, such as the music for the main menu. (It is also worth noting here that something that is akin to a faraway klaxon plays whenever the main menu is loaded up; this is a tradition that reappears in later Puppy Games titles.)
Most of the sound effects in the game appear to be electronic too. The most prominent of these are the droid’s blaster shot, a staccato noise that is quite satisfying to listen to. Rocket/Grenade explosions are also notable, if only because of the jarringly loud and uncharacteristic clangs that they make.
(Side note: For better or worse, these sound effects would be reused in later Puppy Games titles.)
The boss robots utter taunts, but these appear to be stereotypical electronic voices that had been made with speech software. They are nothing new that players who are familiar with the story tropes of rebelling/megalomaniacal A.I.’s have not heard before, but such voice-acting is perhaps otherwise appropriate.
Interestingly, the A.I.’s are taunting the player character as much as they are congratulating it for its progress through the nexus complex.
CONCLUSION:
Puppy Games is/was a budding game developer with many great ideas for fun gameplay in its first title. However, their implementation of these ideas does not exactly make for satisfactory user-friendliness. Their attempts at balancing the capabilities of the player character may also have resulted in some options being too gimped to be worthwhile alternatives over more straight-forward ones.
All these shortfalls make Ultratron difficult to recommend, even after more than half a decade since its debut. If there is any silver lining to be had from the game, Puppy Games would eventually learn from the reception to Ultratron, resulting in increasingly better ones after it.