Today we are going to take a look at Clone Drone in the Danger Zone. This third person casual sword fighter puts you in the shoes of robots – with human minds – forced to fight for the entertainment of other robots. It is available on Steam for 14 € and 99 cents or your regional equivalent.
With this review you have a choice of either reading it here in text form or listening to the video review. They both contain the same content.

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Video review

Text review

Gameplay

This game has seen a decent amount of traction already. And rightfully so, it is a good fun game – but the main reason it seems to get attention is the fact that is has twitch interactions, allowing streamers and their audiences to engage together. This review, isn’t about that. This review is purely about the gameplay from a players perspective – one that isn’t streaming, he is just playing on his own and trying to have fun. Is the game fun then? Let’s find out.
So, let’s first talk about the game’s game-modes. First we have the story mode – where you need to survive 10 rounds in the arena and after these, you get saved and meet with the rest of the humans who managed to survive these 10 rounds. The second mode is the endless one. I don’t think it really needs much explanation as it’s just your regular endless mode. Fight forever. Or until you die. Then there is the twitch mode, where the audience can bet on how exactly you will die. This is the mode that has given this game a lot of attention. And the last mode are the challenges – here you unlock a few more upgrades for your character.
And since we just mentioned the upgrades, let’s talk about them a bit more. With every level you complete you get one upgrade point which you can invest in making your character a bit more to your liking. There a two additional weapons for you to choose – the bow and the hammer, a few active abilities – like the kick and rocket boost. Other then the abilities themselves, you have upgrades for them.
Apart from these two main things, you also need enemies to fight. The enemies in Clone Drone can be divided into 3 basic categories. Swordsmen, archers and hammer-dudes. Plus occasionally you will see Spiderbots. All of the enemies gain more abilities the further you get into the game and thus get progressively harder to defeat. For me personally, the irritating point came whenever the bots learned to parry my bow attacks. But it was also my own fault for specializing too heavily in that particular way.

So, I’ve gotta say, even though you don’t really have a complex fighting system, the battles in Clone Drone always felt really intense, fast and full of fun. And you never feel like the game is unfair. Every mistake is your own. And that is just awesome. I love the fact that there is no dodge in this game, because so many people are used to the invincibility frames that come with them these days instead of moving out of the way with time to spare.

Graphics

Now onto the graphical side of the game. As you can clearly see from the footage, it uses the “minecrafty” graphical style where everything is represented with blocks. I understand why so many games are made in this style, as it is fairly easy to make and allows smaller studios to save some of their money they would need to use to pay for the graphics and use them on gameplay.
And honestly, while I don’t really find this style amazing, here it works pretty well, because the fact that everything around you was made by robots – thus it makes sense they would make things a bit blockier.

Sound and music

The one thing I really liked in Clone Drone is are the announcers. I mean, yes, they sound robotic – because they are robots – but they are also genuinely funny. Yes, they repeat themselves after a few playthroughs, but the lines themselves are funny as heck. I hope more and more lines will be added in future patches.
Otherwise, the sounds were okay, fitting for this type of game.

Performance

Performance wise, I have one issue with the game. Whenever I finished a level, I would experience a drop in the framerate. Yes, the fact that it doesn’t happen during the time you need to framerate to be high makes this not that big of an issue, but it is still somewhat irritating. Hope this gets fixed soon.

Conclusion

So, in conclusion: Clone Drone in the Danger Zone is a fun game with an interesting premise of you being robot fighting in arenas. But sadly, as many games, it falls in the pit of being to expensive for what it is. 15 Euros is just too much. It may be an okay price for twitch streamers, but if you are just looking to play this, I would wait for a sale. Anything under 10 Euros will be worth it.

disclaimer: images have been used from the Steam store page of the game