I was lucky enough to get to spend a good, long time playing
Awesomenauts with Robin Meijer, one of the devs behind the title, and it’s tons of fun albeit somewhat tricky to pick up. The game starts you with a couple of the basic classes and you eventually unlock the other characters. The first game I played, I was
the Cowboy, Sheriff Lonestar, and the second I was
the robot, Clunk. Sheriff Lonestar is your traditional all-rounder while Clunk is your tank character with great defense.
On each map in
Awesomenauts (the game will ship with three), you will have multiple turrets you have to protect while trying to destroy the turrets defending your opponents base. Throughout the match, small droids can be summoned to help you out. As the match gets longer, these droids get stronger. The full match I played at PAX took around 15 minutes to complete. Of course, during the match you can buy items to make yourself stronger and faster. The amount of coins you collect is important as that helps you level up as well. To collect coins, you obviously have to defeat your enemies, but you also get a chance to collect coins each time you die. When you respawn, you do so by crashing down to the map in a rocket that passes coins on its way down. It basically allows you a quick opportunity to build up some cash so you can hit the store to avoid repeating your earlier fate.
Robin and I played the game with four others, so we had three to a team. It reminded me of the old fashioned fun we used to have with video games – you know, when you’d invite a bunch of people over and sit down and play together. Of course, online multiplayer is heavily featured in the game, but the game will hold up really well if you can get a couple of people over and have a local team to take on others over Xbox LIVE.
One final thing I spoke about with the developer is the fact that the game does not take advantage of the new 400G limit on arcade titles. He explained that the opportunity to increase the cap on your game was based on when it was submitted to MS, and since they submitted the title before the deadline, it will be capped at 200G.
Awesomenauts will launch on May 2nd, though a price has yet to be confirmed. We have a plethora of previous coverage for you to check out right
here.