Thank you Sileni Studios for sending us this game to review!

The Galaxy NR TV Show is looking to boost their ratings and throwing killer robots into the Mayan civilization to duke it out should do the trick.  Each combatant is named after a Mayan god and has unique attacks at their disposal.  The goal in Mayan Death Robots is to destroy your opponent’s core before they take yours out.  There are advantages to annihilating them in the process, but it’s not required.

Mayan Death Robots re-invents the 2D artillery genre where the players take simultaneous turns to thrash each other, their opponent's core, or the environment in general.  Unlike the popular Worms games, the players can rebuild the environment Tetris style to shield their core or to box in their enemy.  Each robot earns one block per turn and will lose them all upon their death.  When a robot is killed, the enemy will gain an extra turn. Killing your opponent does have its perks, but taking out the core should be the top priority.   Most of the missions require destroying your enemy’s core, but some missions have you defeating bosses (angry deities) that want to earn back the favor of the Mayans.

The Mayans are yellow and speak in gibberish that sounds like the minions from Despicable Me.  Each robot deity has their own group of Mayans that will worship them and attack the enemy if they get too close.  For each enemy Mayan killed, the explosions of the attacking robot will increase by 2%.  As an added perk, there are Steam achievements available for taking out ten Mayans at a time and for killing more than nine thousand of them.

Steam is the ideal platform for online multiplayer, but unfortunately this title is limited to local multiplayer only.  There are three game modes: Campaign, Quick Match, and Random Match.  The latter two modes become unlocked after you complete three missions in the campaign mode.  

The campaign mode offers plenty of variety in the mission types, boss battles, and unlockable robot deities.  There are lots of weapons at your disposal depending on which god you play as.  The god of death has rockets, but the rockets from the god of the moon have the ability to pull or push its target as well.  Not surprisingly the monkey god can hurl bananas while the god of rain and lightning has lightning bolt attacks.  I liked the earth god’s drill attacks and the diggers and crawlers from the goddess of birth.

Besides all of the deity references, there is violence against the Mayans and the robots.  I did not notice any blood or gore, so it's relatively clean for kids to play.

In the end, this a fun game that any Worms fan will enjoy.  The asking price is a reasonable $15, but given that it’s only local multiplayer, I’d hold off until a sale before picking it up.  If you do get it, there’s plenty of fun to be had as long as you don’t mind all of the god/goddess references.