In a lot of these planetary defense games, there's a real sense of scope and responsibility. You're responsible for the continued existence of a planet beset either by aliens or asteroids (or alien controlled asteroids). Robi: Cosmic Saviour takes a more relaxed approach... in theory. His size plus the layout of the planet makes you think that this little robot lives peacefully out on some small moon, but his home is constantly under siege by space monsters. This is where the peaceful nature of the set-up ends, as these monsters are relentless in their desire to breach the core of your home. Talk about a bad neighborhood.

Robi uses a gravity gun in order to get rid of these unwanted pests. Touching an enemy will activate it, and then you can fling the intruder somewhere else before he plows into your home. Now while your first instinct may be to fling them into space or into each other (and both are adequate solutions), you really should be making use of the orbit mechanic. If you fling an enemy along the arc of your planet's orbit, it will infinitely circle until it smashes into one of its brethren. You have to get the angle right, otherwise it will break orbit and smash into the planet, and sadly because the controls lack a certain level of precision, this can happen a lot.

Once an enemy is destroyed, they will leave behind crystals that need to be tapped on to be collected. This is where the insidious nature of this freemium title comes into play. For starters, you can pay a couple of dollars to have your helper droid collect crystals automatically. This reeks of taking out a streamlined feature of the game to make money, and it triggered our suspicions. Next is that the crystals come in three varieties, and some are more common to come by than others. The upgrades in the shop all cost different amounts of different crystals, and they cost a lot, so you will have to grind for a while to even make your first purchase (oh there are cheaper single use items like rockets for a nominal fee, but they really are single use. Tap once to fire a rocket, that's it, you've just wasted your money).

This would be somewhat excusable if the game was enjoyable enough that you didn't mind playing to rack up the crystals needed to become more powerful, but the difficulty increases so quickly, games average a minute or two, if even that. Really this is another example of aggressive monetary focused design hamstringing what could be an enjoyable title, and while it may find some fans because of its free price tag, it's not going to win over a larger audience.