When the Summer Uprising games were announced, T.E.C. 3001 was the one game that I was immediately drawn to. It had robots, it had style, and it seemed willing to do things a little differently. One of the major problems with XBLIGs is that they often feel like watered down versions of retail games; sure, an arena-based, zombie FPS is amusing for 30 seconds, but why would anyone want to play it when there are a thousand superior games readily available? Well, there aren’t many third-person, 3D platformers where you play as a battery-hungry robot that leaps from one hovering cybernetic path to the next, so I think it’s safe to say that T.E.C. 3001 at least manages to distinguish itself from other Xbox games.

T.E.C. is reminiscent of the special stages of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 if those stages required actual platforming and happened to take place inside the world of Tron. As I played through the first few levels, it felt as if Phoenix Game Studio had solved many of the pesky problems that plague 3D platformers by putting T.E.C. on rails, using a fixed camera and eliminating exploration. That might somewhat restrict the gameplay, but it also allows it to ramp the speed up to ridiculous levels and create a tightly defined obstacle course for the silver robot: a perilous deathtrap that was crafted by someone who wants to ensure that a certain battery-collecting robot dies a thousand painful deaths.

Read the full review of T.E.C. 3001 at the Armless Octopus!