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Tokobot Plus: Mysteries of The Karakuri is a platforming puzzler from Tecmo that features a group of little robots who can work together to help you out in a number of tricky situations. These robots were apparently created many, many years ago by a prehistoric civilisation. Many years later they were rediscovered by an agent of the Canewood’s Lab research agency. Quite how these robots were created before technology had moved beyond rocks isn’t obvious, but they’re now being studied in the lab, and being used to help you navigate around a number of tricky environments. Previously only on the PSP, how does this PS2 port stack up?
As a young, rather weedy, chap called Bolt, the Tokobots are at your command, joining together (or jointing as the game calls it) to attack enemies, build bridges, turn cogs, activate switches and more. At the start of the game you have six Tokobots in your group, but more will join as the game progresses, and new joint abilities will be opened up for you, allowing the Tokobots to take up new formations while linked together. The first couple of levels are genuinely interesting, with the linked Tokobot mechanic being rather unique, but once you’ve progressed beyond this, through the first couple of levels, things aren’t quite as exciting.
The game is entirely focussed on the ancient ruins setting, so every level features the same kind of environment, with plenty of stone and gaps just too large to traverse without using a Tokobot bridge. It all becomes rather samey. The basic mechanics work well, but it stays at that level throughout, without ever trying to build into a bigger, more impressive experience. Puzzles are rarely tricky, and often require you to use the new move you’ve gained only moments earlier. If you’re looking for a challenge, Tokobot Plus won’t deliver.
A perfect example of how the game puts up some rather obvious signposts comes pretty early on. Bolt and the Tokobots have just been given a ‘crane’ ability, and then you’re presented with a puzzle. A picture shows an arrangement of large blocks on a grid, which seems to represent the blocks and grid that you’re stood next to. It doesn’t really take a rocket scientist to figure out which formation you need to use in order to solve the puzzle. To be fair, Tokobot isn’t the first game ever made to give you more than a subtle hint about how to solve puzzles, but when the linked Tokobot mechanic is so intrinsic to the experience, the way it’s been simplified is incredibly disappointing.
Tackling enemies is also less fun than in most platformers. You can use the Tokobots in a number of ways to dispatch the rather peculiar foes, but whether you use the helicopter spin, overhead smash or jumping attack, combat just doesn’t feel right. The helicopter spin is the easiest to use, but even that takes a while to get going at a pace needed to cause any damage. Another attack sees Bolt form the Tokobots into a line and smash them down onto then enemy, but while the Tokobots are jointed Bolt can only move forwards, backwards and strafe from side to side. This makes accurately targeting enemies a real pain, and the camera becoming stuck on scenery doesn’t help either.
Bolt and his robot buddies also move at a painfully slow speed. I’m sure this was partly done in order to prevent camera problems, as the slow pace means there aren’t many occasions where the camera can’t keep up with the action, but after a few hours of the plodding pace, you’ll long for a run of some sort. On the other hand, the sedate nature of proceedings lends the game to a more inexperienced player. If you’re new to the platform genre, Tokobot Plus could well be a nice introduction, allowing you to get a taste of things, but never really putting up much of a challenge. This PlayStation 2 port actually includes a couple of new levels to extend the play time, but they don’t add anything significant to the experience.
Tokobot was an impressive looking game when it launched on the PSP, but on the PlayStation 2 a little more is expected. The blocky environments are fairly small for a home console game, and the frame rate has a habit of slowing down considerably when anything more than a single platform is on screen. Some work has been done on the text heavy cutscenes that pop-up frequently, and now include voice acting, but they still serve to slow things down rather than provide interesting information on the story. The theme song that plays over the title screen is a touch of genius, but other than that the audio work isn’t anything special.
Tokobot Plus isn’t a bad game, but a few niggling design issues get in the way of what could have been a much more entertaining platformer. The jointed Tokobot moves work well, and the opening sections are good fun, but the ideas soon run out, leaving a game that isn’t brilliant as an all out action platformer, nor as a puzzle-based adventure. It sounds minor, but the slow movement speed doesn’t help things either, resulting in a game that becomes somewhat of a chore to play after a few hours. Its simple nature was easy to tolerate on the PSP, but as a PS2 game it has bigger and better games to compete with, making it a hard game to recommend.
