Did last week's paranormal body-swapper Slitterhead leave you cold? Do you consider its brain-jacking of rando cityfolk for monster-hunting purposes a sad waste of potential? Perhaps you'll prefer RAM: Random Access Mayhem, out now in Steam early access, in which you're a fugitive AI hopping between warlike robot bodies in top-down view.
Yes, the subtitle involves both a colon and a dad joke, but the demo is entertaining - Nuclear Dawn meets Ctrl Alt Ego, in short. The one major criticism I have after 20 minutes or so is that the flat pixelart perspective makes walls and walkable surfaces look interchangeable, and this feels more like a question of acclimatisation than a real complaint.
Those robot bodies, then. They range from cheery grenade-throwing dustbins on wheels to punchy gladiators equipped with a grapple. You'll switch between by aiming the cursor and pressing space, but you'll need energy to do so, and energy is, of course, obtained by killing.
Early-game gambits include teleporting into the head of the robot behind an attacking horde and shooting all the others all in the back. Beyond that, you'll want to possess bots that are strong against the types in play. It feels like there's decent variety: each bot has a primary and a secondary attack, and you can customise them with collectible upgrade sticks, picking from three techs each time. You'll get more of those upgrades if you pull off Bulletstorm-esque trickshots such as punching one robot into another or using your flamethrower to propel yourself around like a battering ram. I mean, a battering RAM. See, I can do dad jokes too.
"Cor, this top-down roguelike shooter is quite something, lemme tell ya," a jovial Katharine (RPS in peace) wrote in February. "With its twinstick controls and bevy of robot opponents to mow down, this is a fast-paced action game that doesn't pull any punches."
The devs estimate that RAM's early access period will "last around a year, depending on how the feedback around the
PC
arcade
Indie
shooter
Roguelike
Hack & Slash