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Solatorobo: TGS hands-on impression

By Heath | September 16, 2010 at 7:22 am

CyberConnect2, most famous for the .hack series, was teaming with Namco Bandai to show off Solatorobo at the Tokyo Game Show. I played a two-part demo.
I’m gonna make an educated guess about the title “Solatorobo,” and say that it was chosen because it’s about flying robots. “Sora” (or “sola,” as it were) means sky, “to” means “and,” while “robo” is representing robots. =*The more you know*=
The first was a flying mode. Pressing B would charge up my “boost” meter while my furry avatar and his flying robot began to levitate. From there, it kind of felt like Pilot Wings. I was jetting around in this sky-shredding, open-top robo suit and my objective was to land on floating islands and grab boxes. Not a thrilling objective, but the point was to give me a look at the crappy controls, and that’s what I got.
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Next up was Scenario Mode, in which I controlled Foxdog and his robot on the ground. Reaching out and grabbing stuff with that robot arm was again critical to existence. In the ground mode, most things were picked up so that they could be hurled at foes and obstacles. A feature battle of this demo had me and McGruff on an outside part of a big airship. Another airship was firing missiles at mine, so I had to catch them and throw them at the ship’s weak point for massive damage.

Solatorobo was visually pretty impressive, though I can’t speak for the sound and music, because there weren’t headphones, rendering me unable to hear a thing. Platforming elements have decent potential, from what the demo displayed.

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Solatorobo controls a bit oddly, but perhaps it just takes getting used to. Outside of the awkward flying aspects, it felt pretty much like an average RPG. Click the category at the bottom (from back when it was called “Solarobo”) for screens, scans, and so on.

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Topics: Solarobo, Tokyo Game Show 2010