I tried to cook bacon this morning after removing 2-3 feet of snow from around my car. As a result, I type this in an apartment filled with a grey haze—like a small cloud of carcinogenic fog has decided to take a nap—sprawling from the kitchen toward the living room.
None of this has anything to do with Holo vs Robo, but if at any point my thoughts wander a little too far, it’s probably from the smoke inhalation.
Anyway. Holo vs Robo. It’s a Hololive themed Plants Vs Zombies clone. It’s a perfectly okay game, if (currently) a bit underwhelming in some areas. If you like Hololive, and never played Plants Vs Zombies, you’ll probably like this. If you don’t know what Hololive is, it’s a Japanese VTuber company. And if you don’t what VTubers are, you can either watch this video, or live in blissful ignorance.
On the other hand, apparently Plants Vs Zombies came out 16 years ago: back when I still had hope for the future, and joy in my heart. And given that it’s been turned from a lovely polished single game, to a franchise that included a class-based shooter (that I actually really liked) and a billion terrible mobile games, I figure it’s probably worth discussing the mechanics at least a little bit.
Gameplay
Overall, this is a tower defense game. If you’re not familiar with the genre, it goes something like this: waves of enemies spawn in, and you need to build structures to attack and stop them from reaching your base. When I call Holo vs Robo a Plants Vs Zombies clone, it’s not because the two are both tower defense games; it’s because HvR pretty much lifts all of its mechanics wholesale from PvZ.
This includes things like the pre-battle screen. Here, you’ll select the up to 8 units you’ll be able to use in the next battle, while on the right side of the screen you’ll get a preview of the enemy types you’re going to face. Enemies start out as fairly simple robots, and evolve into fancier versions as the game goes on, most of which are some sort of Hololive callback or in-joke.
Once you’re in a level, you’ll spend Cheer (sun/money) to place down towers. Towers have a variety of properties, best demonstrated by going over the ones I have in the above image.
Furthest on the left, we have Ollie, the red-haired one. Ollie doesn’t attack, but does generate additional Cheer to buy more towers. In the second column from the left, we have Gura (White Hair/Blue Shirt) and Aqua (Pink Hair). Gura shoots bullets that travel down her lane, and the lane above and below her, while Aqua shoots fast weak attacks down the lane she’s placed in. The green one is Fauna, who heals towers in front of her, and the brown haired one is Nodoka, who acts as a wall.
So there’s your general list of tower behaviors: generate resources, attack, heal, or defend.
You might notice that there’s no enemies actually visible on the screen, because this configuration of towers is killing them as fast as they can spawn. Aside from some special robots and a few specific level, this is not a very hard game. In my case, I found everything but the bonus content and sliding panel levels to be pretty easy, taking about 11 hours total to do 90% of the game’s content.
Complaints and Praise
I don’t think Holo vs Robo is a bad game, but that’s mostly because Plants Vs Zombies wasn’t a bad game. There are some things I am more tolerant of, and some which I am less tolerant of. There’re also a few choices I quite like.
As a small gripe, the menu options is a bit shit. Following a grand tradition of a certain types of games, I had to launch the game with custom Unity flags to make it run on my ultrawide, something I’ve found myself doing a lot more than I’d like to as of late.
As a larger thing, the game doesn’t really do as much to solve the fundamental problem of tower defense games: once you find a setup that works, you tend to just run that setup until it stops working. This was also a problem that Plants Vs Zombies had, but again: that game came out 16 years ago. While a few levels spice things up, there are still really limited options for Cheer generation, and many of the “good” units… just stay good throughout the entire game. As a result, I don’t really remember what I did during the last 10 levels prior to the finale.
I did really enjoy a lot of the bonus content. There’s some fun goofy mini-games in addition to the story mode. The art for the little chibi Hololive members is pretty great.
Overall, I don’t really recommend Holo Vs Robo to non-Hololive fans at the moment. It’s a perfectly fine game, but so much of the humor and enjoyment here is based on knowing Hololive in-jokes that I have to imagine it’ll feel like a bit of a non sequitur for anyone else.
For Hololive fans, if you’ve never played the original Plants Vs Zombies, this might not be a bad place to try it out. It’s $7.00 on Steam.
Side Note: As a Hololive fan, I was a bit bummed to discover that the Hololive member I follow (and who‘s on my computer case), Mori Calliope, wasn’t available as a tower, but instead as one of the single use powerups—and IMO, the worst one in the game. It’s a not tragedy or anything, but I can imagine folks who discover their favorite member either isn’t available (or just kinda sucks) being a little disappointed like I was. I wish the game did offer more ways to use each tower type. It’s a small thing, but something I did find myself thinking about.