The beloved 80's animated series gets its first downloadable title. Does it shine bright like Voltron's sword, or does it make you feel like you've been cursed by the witch Haggar?
Fighting the evil King Zarkon's forces with... a twin-stick shooter?
The biggest surprise during my time with Voltron is that developer Behaviour Interactive went the twin-stick route for this beloved franchise--you know the drill, move with the left stick, shoot with the right. Actually, the biggest surprise is how much precious little time you'll spend as the iconic giant robot, but more on that in a bit. You'll spend the bulk of your time here commanding one of the five lions that make up the Voltron Force. Each one has unique stats in terms of health and attack power, etc. at the start menu with slight different attacks. I chose the Black Lion because even in the cartoon, objectively it's the best of all of the lions.
Anyway, you'll be piloting your lion through various planetary environments (with some "flying" sequences in space mixed in), shooting down King Zarkon's forces as they swarm you from various directions off-screen. Along the way, you'll attempt to rescue refugees by walking over them so that they can be beamed to safety and generally strafing and moving so that you don't get yourself blown up.
This... actually isn't too bad. As with any good shooter, there's tons of stuff blowing up on screen and you're responsible for most of it and instead of going for predictable attack patterns, Voltron seems to go for a more organic approach to enemy vessels swarming and attacking you. You can rack up combos by killing enemies in rapid succession and I think this gives your primary weapon a bit of an upgrade but the rate of fire and look of my lion's attack wasn't exactly distinct from the upgraded attack. There's also a special attack mapped to the Right Trigger that takes a nice chunk out of enemy hits and a melee attack which frankly, puts you in harm's way more than it allows you to deal out damage.
Those enemies by the way come in two flavors: fairly detailed and distinct enemy tanks ships and very generic, almost particle effect-like attackers without any sort of visual personality or any real point of reference with the TV series. Likewise, the actual environments feel weirdly barren in spots, with forest, followed by forest, followed by forest with some cut and past buildings.
Speaking of the TV series, context for your missions is provided via clips from the original series presented in a window in the middle of your screen. You'll also get tiny audio clips of the heroes' reactions while you're shooting (I got to hear Commander Keith say "Wonderful" quite a lot).
If there's one thing the game does that I can stand behind, it's the eject feature when your lion has taken too many hits (on the ground, at least). Instead of simply exploding, Voltron takes a page from Mech Assault and allows your character to eject for 10 seconds while your lion restores itself. This leads to some of the most frantic and lively moments in the game and you simply try to shoot your way clear of way more powerful enemies until you're clear to jump back into your lion.
You and four other lions, doing some stuff
Would you like some QTE's with that combat?
A slightly lackluster shooter experience could maybe be overlooked if the reward was getting to pilot the big 'bot in slobberknocker fights with some of the monsters from the show. But in a baffling decision that smacks of a brutal lack of either time or resources, those times when you get to combine the whole team to fight one of the witch Haggar's creations, it's simply in a protracted, admittedly well-animated QTE that'll have you mashing buttons at way too many prompts. Let me be clear: in this Voltron game, you don't get to control the title character, you merely get to press A when prompted or press one of the triggers to dodge.
The whole thing makes Voltron: Defender of the Universe ultimately feel shabby, like all of the fun parts were stripped out and what was left was what could either be afforded or built on a limited timeline. Again, the shooting is okay--could maybe have been a bit tighter in parts--but the core reason for the experience, the big guy in the title not really being part of the whole experience is really a bummer.
Voltron: Defender of the Universe is available now on PSN and XBLA for $10 and 800 Microsoft Points respectively.
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