As someone who is a big fan of both first-person shooters and roguelikes, I’ve been surprised that up to this point there haven’t been many attempts to bring these two concepts together, and surely none that have been an obvious hit. In the case of ROBOBEAT I was even more excited by the potential of further throwing a music and rhythm angle into the mix, making for what seemed would be an ambitious if eclectic mix of elements. There’s no question that the resulting game is distinctive, but at least on the Switch it doesn’t feel like it really comes together fully.

The concept here is to pair an arena shooter with some roguelike randomness, and then top it off with backing tracks where you’ll get rewarded for firing on the beat and penalized when you’re a bit off. To some degree the combination is successful, with the relatively tight spaces you’re working in making you stay on the move as you jump, slide, and glide around while trying to take out enemies with a weapon in each hand. To start your selection of tunes and weapons is extremely limited, and it will take some time and making progress to begin unlocking more. The musical component, while present, in general feels pretty subdued, but you will get better results the more you’re able to stay with the beat.

Getting to the game’s issues, unfortunately it’s hard not to quickly come up with a list. While there’s a roguelike element where you’ll eventually get to choose a perk here or there, it happens far too little and in general your choices feel more like simple buffs more often than not rather than being transformative, which is disappointing. I can also see the logic in having you start out with a limited array of weapons and music available, with a conceptual hook being a stream of unlocks ahead of you to keep you coming back. Unfortunately, I also think the initial offering of weapons and music is too stingy, making the vision of the game’s full potential quite weak overall. The promise of more exciting play in the future doesn’t always work well when you begin to feel stuck with less engaging play to slog through to get there. I also wish the controls were a bit more effective, with an option to supplement your aim with the gyro like some other titles have done. The flow of play and your aim just feel quite stiff, and it was also strange sometimes feeling like aim assist was taking charge but other times it didn’t seem to help at all.

In the end, this just feels like a middling shooter that bolted on some extra elements, but didn’t fully invest in making the most of them. The roguelike element, in particular, just isn’t present enough to be fully felt with mostly lackluster perks that were awarded too infrequently. The rhythm aspect, while present, also didn’t quite click for me, and part of that is that most of the music in the game failed to really get me into a groove. It was mostly just there, but not deeply felt. With those extra elements then failing to suck me in more, the repetition and a general lack of much variety in the various arena stages also became apparent. To some degree I do wonder if the experience has lost a step and some of the intensity it may more capably deliver on other systems. This seems like it has the right ideas in mind, but the execution of them just failed to inspire much excitement in the end.