Genre: Strategy RPG
Developer: Yumekobo
Publisher: SNK

The character artwork in Biomotor Unitron is fairly well done, with a nice, clean approach to the anime-heavy presentation. Especially, the graphics are much better than the competing Gameboy Color RPG's. The dungeons are a bit spartan presentationally, as every floor and wall looks much the same, making dungeon romping rather repetetive. There is not much animation so to speak of, and the battles seem to be an imitation Pokemon with their white backgrounds. On the whole, a decent graphical job by Yumekobo, but games like Samurai Shodown II have shown us what the NGPC can really do.

The music is a nice, futuristic-sounding selection, but with a hint of fantasy to it. It is well orchestrated, and some of the tunes, particularily the opening sequence, are exceptional. The sound effects are a whole different matter. First off, there are probably 5 sound effects in the entire game- a beep when you selection a menu item, and some generic pound and slash battle effects that we've all heard 1000 times. Of course, it's difficult to do many creative sound effects with a 6-channel PSG sound chip, so the music weights a tad more here.

The premise of Biomotor Unitron is to play through 4 randomly-generated dungeons to collect items and raw materials, which you use to build new arms, or weapons, for your fighting mech (aka Unitron). You then proceed to work your way up a tournament ladder in order to beat the game. There are dozens of combinations of materials to use in constructing arms, and discovering a new combination and its resulting, powerful new arm is rewarding and fun. Unfortunately, the randomly-generated dungeons are simply boring to look at and explore. Each level of the dungeon features progressively harder enemies, but both the enemies and the dungeon appearance stay exactly the same. Playing up the tourney ladder and building arms is fun, but those require money, so the dungeons unfortunately cannot be avoided.

Biomotor Unitron shows flashes of a solid experience, such as the great opening sequence, and the arms-building, which is actually very entertaining. Unfortunately, the good parts of the game are partially overshadowed by the exceptionally sleep-inducing dungeon exploration portion of the game. I don't really think Biomotor Unitron is that poor of a game, and some people with long attention spans may be able to overlook the boring dungeons for a solid title. I think most people will want to stay away however.