Making The Castle Doctrine Fun!

Christmas is a special time of year. There’s awesome light decorations to drive around and see, get togethers with family and friends who don’t happen to live in New York City or California, and – oh yeah – shopping. Lots, and lots of shopping. Brick and mortar stores, online, stealing stuff from the back of commercial trucks or getting your bots to help buy a couple thousand game consoles and video cards to overprice and sell to a network of idiots willing to pay a membership to get access to these overpriced game consoles and video cards – you name it, there’s an avenue to shop from.

How’s it going everybody, this is another review from the Broken Controller Club – my name’s Ed and I’ll be your host this chilly winter evening. As you pull up a delicious home pour of your favorite eggnog, be sure to subscribe and help me get to 200 subs by the end of the year so I know that my family and friends aren’t the only people I’m talking to.

If you’ve also seen Home Alone, you’re aware that there’s also pieces of garbage that want to break into your house to steal the stuff you just bought your family and – let’s be honest here – mostly for yourself. Roombo: First Blood decides to let you play out how you’d deal with those same thieving dirtbags, to gloriously bloody effect. If you’ve ever wanted to play a video game of Home Alone where you could actually set traps to maim and kill burglars, then this is for you. Roombo is part of a series you can find on Steam called Justice Sucks. It’s developed by Samurai Punk, who also made the really awesome and equally hilarious Screen Cheat.

The only story here is that your owners are out of the house for the night, and burglars start to break in. Your job is to see where they’re at, hack the electronics in the house, murder everybody, then clean up afterward. I mean, you ARE a roomba after all. Have some class.

The game is pretty short, with the game split up into a half dozen levels with some bonus levels you get after clearing the main game. That’ll be disappointing to some but not really that bad. The game has some replayability in that you can mess around with a bunch of different electronics in the house, so the game doesn’t have to be played the same way if you’d rather experiment.

After everybody’s dead, a happy song will play and you’ll have a minute to clean up as many footsteps, blood, and dead bodies you can.

Each level starts with burglars immediately beating on the windows and trying to get in. It’s very reminiscient of a zombie game, and honestly the AI is about as intelligent. When you’re ready to activate a trap you’ll enter what’s called “hack mode” where everything in close proximity that you can mess with will be highlighted, and the game moves in super slow mo to give you time to think. If you’re playing docked you’ll use the analog to select what you want to activate, and if you’re playing in handheld mode you can just tap your trap of choice. Ceiling fans will spin really fast before falling and damaging enemies, TVs will explode, fireplaces shoot flames out. It basically looks like the developers watched a bunch of TV shows from the 90s where hackers would cause electronics to do things they’re not ever capable of doing and included them in this game.

Some traps were especially hilarious, like making the air conditioners blow really cold and freeze enemies, or activating a shower and somehow the enemy gets caught in there because the doors opened and trapped them inside. I don’t know how you get caught in a shower since there’s no locks on the door and you can just get out, but then I’m assuming these are the same types of people that got my kid’s order wrong at Burger King the other day after I repeated myself no less than 4 times, so brilliance isn’t what they’re known for.

You’ve got some other tricks at your disposal in addition to traps. You can suck up knives to shoot back at enemies, a surprisingly lethal move despite shooting them at ankle height. You can also honk at enemies to draw them to your location, which they’ll then chase you almost single file while you kill each one of them with traps you can make them run into, and once you’ve sucked up enough blood, you’ll get an overpowered ram attack that you can aim at them. Time it right and you’ll nail a few of them at once.

Speaking of blood – these people must have some advanced form of Hemophilia, because they lose like 5 pints of blood when they get hit by anything. After everybody’s dead, a happy song will play and you’ll have a minute to clean up as many footsteps, blood, and dead bodies you can. All of this will get you a score at the end. Also the Roomba has a little happy face when he’s cleaning up all of the carnage and it’s pretty hilarious. That’s basically the whole game.

So like I said, there’s not a lot of levels here, though you’ll unlock some extra levels and a gallery at the end. Unfortunately the house is the same in each level as well, so you’ll get familiar with your environment quickly. Having that knowledge along with the traps and ramming attack, you really feel almost bad for the burglars because they don’t realize how screwed they are as they’re coming in. Which now that I think of it is the way it should be. There’s still some budget-priced fun to be had here, though, and if you feel like dropping a few bucks on it for some funny and bloody light strategy game fun, then I say go for it. You’ll probably plow through it in a day if you really want, but you’ll still be able to get some laughs out of it and the action is entertaining. And really that’s what we play video games for – to have fun. And I had fun with this one and I don’t regret buying it.