When it comes to local multiplayer games to simply enjoy with family and friends, in theory the bar doesn’t need to be too high to make a good impression. By adding the desire to be the winner, trash talking, and people already in a good mood, games that are easy to pick up, understand, and play can be a blast. That said, there’s absolutely a risk that by setting the bar too low for coming up with something fresh and having enough variety, the experience can also collapse pretty quickly. I see that as the trap Splatterbot has fallen into.

At its core, this is a game concerned with territorial control. Each player will control a little Roomba-like device that spreads paint, and the goal is that at the end of the round your color will be the most dominant one in the current arena. Aside from simply choosing what direction to move in you’ll also have the ability to give yourself a quick boost, but while you’ll quickly move in a direction doing that you won’t be putting down paint during that quick burst. In order to throw a little more fun into the mix there are also power-ups that have a variety of effects, whether making you bigger, triggering a splash of paint, moving faster, and more. Finally, each of the game’s stages have different elements to introduce variety, whether it's a conveyor belt around the sides, a gap between areas that you’ll need to boost over or risk falling off, and more.

The problem for my wife and I as we played it is that there just wasn’t enough meat on the overall bone for it to stay interesting for very long. Sure, adding two more human players, rather than bots, could have at least added a little more fun, but that wouldn’t change the fact that there’s just not much in the way of variety here ultimately. The power-ups are a wild card, for sure, but that can cut both ways since there can be times where they seem to somehow favor a particular player, or if someone gets bigger or more speed early on everything can snowball from that point. Worse, given that some form of territorial control is often featured in minigame collections like Mario Party and others, it isn’t clear that having a more elaborate dedicated version of that same idea adds enough flavor to make for sustained fun. Perhaps the simplicity of play could make it more accessible and fun for families with less experienced players, but for everyone else this just doesn’t have enough depth to make much of a case for itself.