The Great Wobo Escape (Android) Review

The Great Wobo Escape sees the player helping a cute little robot escape a lab. They will need to jump, hide, and manoeuvre their way to safety. Across their journey, they will be hunted, find collectibles, and have to survive environmental dangers galore. None of this sounds any different than any other platformer, and to be fair, The Great Wobo Escape really doesn't bring anything wildly new to the table. This is actually an example of being fantastic not in what it offers, but how.

Traps are generally very generic, and the collectibles are usually easy to stumble upon. Levels, wisely, manage to be long enough to feel meaty, but short enough to be easily sat down - and returned to. Save points are, sadly, not as frequent as they could be, and that means the player may find themselves trying to beat the same spot over and over, getting sent back what seems a rather unfair distance for every failure.

The Great Wobo Escape is a 3D platformer, and the controls are all touch-based. Thanks to the myriad of hazards trying to assault your little chibi-bot at every corner, the game becomes less about precision, and more about timing. You will be expected to run between hiding spots, timing your run against mine carts and steam trying to kill you. This dependency on timing is very refreshing for a platformer, which often relegates timing to "When will the platform come back out of the wall and go back?"

The game even manages to have a somewhat interesting story, though it won't wow most players. The Great Wobo Escape doesn't look particularly good, either, instead managing to simply get the job done graphically. It has serious problems in the difficulty department, and in how unfair a lot of the deaths feel. The player may jump over a hazard, and upon landing, find themselves sliding into another one. They may not see an incoming hazard because it's just not very clear what it is as it rolls onto the screen from its particular spawning point. It's fascinating how hard the difficulty is, considering how incredibly easy the puzzles tend to be. Show up, turn on a console, and proceed after it does whatever it was supposed to. The timing puzzles are the best part, although they act more like stealth mechanics than actual puzzles.