Botworld Odyssey review for PC, Nintendo Switch

Botworld Odyssey got its start as a mobile game, Botworld Adventure. This is simultaneously the most- and least-surprising thing about the game.

It’s not at all surprising because if you know that Botworld Odyssey started life as a mobile game, you can see how the game would’ve worked on a pay-to-win model. It’s a creature-collecting game (or, I guess, bot-collecting game) where you’re collecting parts to upgrade your bots, and it’s very obvious where the microtransactions must’ve been in the freemium version. You improve your bots by grinding your way through battle after battle, and I have to assume that the process is a lot quicker when you’re able to bypass all that by paying real money to buy gems and other goodies.

Why, then, would I say that it’s also the most surprising thing about Botworld Odyssey? Because the developers have done a good job of papering over all those places where they’d have asked for money in the mobile version. Yes, there’s some grinding involved in levelling-up your bots, but at the same time, the game clearly draws inspiration from the likes of Pokémon, which is hardly a stranger to making players grind their way through battle after battle to evolve your monster.

What’s more, the battles aren’t exactly arduous, even if they’re a little repetitive, thanks to the fact that you don’t have to do much in them beyond setting your bots down in the arena – after that, they do pretty much all the fighting themselves. You can toss grenades, bombs, and other tools into the arena to help your bots do their best, but you can also set the fights to auto-battle and let the game handle everything. While there was the odd intense battle that required closer involvement, for the most part you can just focus on gathering materials and upgrading your bots.

So Botworld Odyssey isn’t exactly challenging. But it makes up for that by giving you a decent-sized world to explore, with plenty of diversity in terms of how the various areas look. Similarly, the game gives you plenty of new quests to choose from, with enough variety between them that it doesn’t feel like the game is just asking you to do the same thing over and over again. And, most importantly, there’s a nice range of abilities between all the bots – much like Pokémon has its various types of monsters, Botworld Odyssey allows you to mix and match the members of your team to make sure your bots complement each other.

In other words, there’s plenty to like about Botworld Odyssey. It’s made the jump from mobile gaming to PC without feeling like it had to sacrifice much, and it offers players a nice twist on the creature-collecting genre in the process.

Featherweight Games provided us with a Botworld Odyssey PC code for review purposes.