Medabots Infinity (GameCube)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 2.5 stars OK
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 5.4 (2.5 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Bethany Massimilla
• Reviewed on: 01/21/2004
• Released on: 12/14/2003
• Originally published on GameSpot: Medabots Infinity (GameCube) Review

The Medabots franchise is most easily described as yet another sort of Pokémon clone. Here, though, young children befriend, raise, and then battle kid-sized robots rather than crazy critters. Based on the popular cartoon, Medabots Infinity allows you to assume the role of a boy named Ikki, who's trying to battle his way to first place in the Medafighter race at the Toru-Toru Land amusement park. The grand prize, bragging rights notwithstanding, is a free yearly pass to Toru-Toru Land and all the food you can eat while you're there. This is apparently all the motivation Ikki needs to repeatedly tackle the park's many attractions, while occasionally subduing the obligatory hapless bad guys--called Rubberobos--in the process. The premise may be rather cute, but the game is certainly not. Medabots Infinity exhibits aggravating gameplay and presents an imprecise camera, and the results are anything but fun.

You primarily progress through the game by clearing the stages of different areas in the park. Some of these stages have you navigating a forest or snowfield, some have you exploring a laboratory, and some have you negotiating the halls of ruins. In each attraction, your selected Medabot is plunked into the environment. A small grid-map appears in the corner of the screen, and a red dot on this map denotes your goal. You clear a stage by either reaching your goal or reaching your goal and then winning the Robattle that follows. The journey along the way is fraught with traps, natural hazards, enemy robots, cannons, and even lasers. Successfully completing a level nets you experience points that raise the base stats of the Medabot you use. If your Medabot gets destroyed before you clear a stage, you have to start afresh from the very beginning.

What makes the game's stages infuriating is the fact that there is no mapping system, and the goal area is often sealed off by several doors. Sometimes these doors are opened by stepping on switches that are scattered throughout the level, and sometimes these doors are opened by clearing missions that can be triggered throughout the level. You never know which of these is the case, so if you reach the level goal and find that a door is still locked, you must then retrace your steps, while again avoiding the traps, natural hazards, robots, cannons, and lasers that you recently escaped. However, since you have no map, you additionally need to have memorized where you've been and must spend time checking every last nook and cranny for the switch that you possibly missed. The switch may have even been in a room that you've already visited, or it may have been obscured by the camera views that can be absolutely wretched in this game, especially in indoor areas with high walls. Precise control of the camera is assigned to the D pad, which means that unless you want to stop to tilt your view in small increments--while getting pelted by cannon fire--you need to keep centering the camera behind yourself repeatedly. This can get tricky in areas with narrow corridors, 90-degree bends, and rolling boulders.

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