Botworld Odyssey is the newest title by Sydney-based studio Featherweight Games. Taking inspiration from creature-collecting games like Pokémon, you play as an adorable animal person as you pursue your quest of becoming the world’s greatest botmaster and travelling the world. The charmingly adorable designs of the characters and bots are endearing, as is the bouncy soundtrack. However, the fact that the game is effectively an incredibly grindy port of its free-to-play mobile game predecessor, Botworld Adventure, with too few changes to its gameplay to make it fit for the PC and console audience (let alone charge the premium price point that it does) wore me down.
Once you have designed your character, you then set off with your family on a hastily built raft as you sail to Scavenger’s Landing in pursuit of becoming the greatest botmaster. By scavenging scrap piles and acquiring random junk from fights with wild bots, bandits and rival botmasters, you can upgrade your bots as well as your boat, which increases your level cap and opens up access to new areas of the map (despite your character travelling exclusively via jetpack).
“Combat is a very hands-off affair, where you place bots on the battlefield and then just…watch them go.”
The main element setting Botworld Odyssey apart from Pokémon and most other games of its kind is that you do not actually directly control the bots under your command. Combat is a very hands-off affair, where you initially place three of your party of six bots on the battlefield and then just… watch them go. You have no way of issuing any sort of commands to your bots, such as moving them around or focusing on a particular foe.
The player’s sole actual contribution is to fling rockets and buffs at the battlefield to damage your opponents or aid your team. These abilities can be swapped out and upgraded, and to the game’s credit, there’s a decent variety of them. You can also equip Boosters which provide passive buffs to your team. Once the actual fights started, however, my sense of actual contribution to the result began and ended with occasionally dealing some decisive damage with a well-placed frost missile or poison dart.
It was a profoundly uninvolving combat system that, with the inclusion of an auto-battle button that literally gets the AI to perform all the actions the player would otherwise need to take, made me feel like I was barely required to involve myself as long as I was about the same level or higher as my opponent. That said, as the hours wore on, I became glad for the auto-battle system’s presence, as the sheer quantity of combat makes it almost a necessity at times.
Botworld Odyssey doesn’t have random encounters per se, instead, enemy botmasters and wild bots roam the overworld and draw you into a fight if they touch you, akin to the newer Pokémon games or Dragon Quest XI. Ordinarily, it’s a nice compromise that keeps the tension of a random encounter system while making them a bit more avoidable for players looking for a less stressful experience. Unfortunately, Botworld Odyssey neglected to consider the second part of that equation, as no matter the foe, weak or strong, all of them run straight at you as soon as you so much as enter the same postcode as them and are practically impossible to shake off. It doesn’t even matter if your bots are three times their level and would crush them into scrap metal in any sort of confrontation, the enemies are incredibly relentless, making actually getting around anywhere exhausting.
And this ties nicely into Botworld Odyssey’s pedigree as a free-to-play mobile title. I did register some hallmarks of a mobile port early on, such as very barebones graphical options on PC, combat which mostly involves tapping and dragging on things and an insistence on holding down a button whenever I wanted to interact with a scrap pile. However, it was the game’s economy and progression systems that really indicated the game’s ancestry.
In fairness, a lot of the F2P trappings have been stripped away. For instance, leaving town to explore, which used to cost limited resources, is now free, regardless of how many game-overs you experience. Any and all actual microtransactions have been removed, and the cosmetic options and rare materials that used to cost premium currency in Botworld Adventure are now more readily available within the game itself, without having to spend any actual money.
On the other hand, the rest of the game’s progression doesn’t seem to have been substantially rebalanced to reflect that this is no longer a free product offering premium options to bypass the grind. Many of the game’s requirements, from the amount of scrap required to upgrade your bots or boat to many main missions simply require tired busywork, like roaming around a vast, bot-filled swamp finding 20 waiver forms that are spaced far away from one another and which change locations every time I leave the area, felt unreasonably tedious. The drop rate of some premium scrap is also unbearably slow, with one mandatory boat upgrade material dropping only from certain kinds of bandits, in a place that costs in-game money to visit, and even then they only dropped them sometimes, and only one at a time. And I needed twenty of them!
Obtaining botframes from rare Alpha Bots lets you build new bots of your own. Like Monster Hunter Stories 2, any new bot you construct starts at level 1. As such, unless you happen to have a lot of appropriate scrap and gold to spend, they can take a while to bring up to speed. It’s a shame as the bot designs are all rather cute and varied, with some entertaining animations in battle and whenever they level up.
The experience of trudging through a swamp, getting endlessly ambushed by bots while searching for waiver forms that never showed up anywhere, felt like a microcosm of my 20+ hours with Botworld Odyssey so far. I was in a recurring loop of grinding for rare materials to increase the level cap and unlock new areas so I could grind for rare materials somewhere else instead. Don’t get me wrong, I can stand a grindy experience if the gameplay is still fun; I have a deep and abiding love for the Monster Hunter series and still really enjoyed Octopath Traveler II despite calling its progression system “grind-tastic” in my review. That said, when Botworld Odyssey’s combat is so barebones that it literally plays itself, the gameplay doesn’t have much going for it outside of the grind.
In full transparency, I played about 22 hours of Botworld Odyssey. In that time, I advanced to Boat level 9 out of 15; essentially making it about halfway through the main story and having hit many rare scrap-related bottlenecks which halted my progress for hours while I farmed for necessary upgrade materials. As such, consider this article a bit more than a first impression, but not exhaustive enough for a full-scored review. As charming as I found the game’s visuals, and as suitable as the experience may be on mobile as a free-to-play game, Botworld Odyssey is simply too simplistic and barebones an experience for me to recommend it as a full-priced PC game.