P. Walter Tugnut is about to be vindicated. For years now, he's been marginalized, living on the fringe of society in an RV, working in a robot factory, and spending every spare moment trying to warn the doubtful populace of an impending robot revolt.

Well, the robots are revolting. And the only thing to do is grab a gun and make with the shooting.

This side-scroller (a shooter, as the title would suggest, but with action RPG elements) is a well-balanced combination of old-school button-mashing appeal and innovative leveling and character development systems. Rather than the traditional route of picking a character class right from the start and being stuck with it, the equipment selected for purchase largely determines the character's personality traits, making characters more mutable mid-game than one would normally expect.

Players are also always equipped with two weapons: a primary gun, which is typically an all-purpose affair with unlimited ammo, and a secondary weapon that is usually something a bit more hefty, but which also must be recharged or reloaded. For this option, I myself went with the freeze ray, which was at least as long as I was tall, and bright orange. And it did, indeed, shoot many robots.

The controls are quite straightforward: Buttons control jumping, shooting, weapon swap and melee combat (though this seemed somewhat ineffective, at least in the levels that I played through, but perhaps it is useful in some scenarios). Jumping and hitting Left Trigger will allow players to use a jetpack to hover briefly, and Left Bumper, when held while standing over a fallen comrade will revive them.

Speaking of comrades, Shoot Many Robots was designed with co-op play in mind, according to Senior Designer Josh Glavine, and features both local and online. Local is played, obviously, with two players, but the online mode can take up to four, and is somewhat of a different experience, as certain scenarios actually do involve a bit more verbal communication and coordination between players than one might expect from similar games.

Additionally, there are various difficulty levels, as one might expect, but they are implemented a bit differently than usual. Normally, players would expect either to be able to change difficulty levels mid-stream, or have to play through an entire game in order to unlock the next level, but in Shoot Many Robots, everyone must start out in "normal", with increased difficulty levels unlocked as options as the game progresses.

One of the things I've noticed so far at Pax Prime 2011 is a heavy trend towards manmade apocalypse scenarios, and it's easy to lose the individual entries in clouds of zombie/robot/golem/etc. debris. However, Shoot Many Robots bears all the hallmarks of a pretty solid little game. It will be available on PSN and XBL, as well as for PC, though I dare say the game's charm will be maximized with a console controller clenched firmly in the hands.

Shoot them robots, for they are many.