Editors’ Choice Games

Tiny Robots: Portal Escape

Review by Angie Kibiloski

Tiny Robots: Portal Escape is the latest free-to-play mobile game from Snapbreak Games, in which you must explore interactive diorama scenes, finding keys and other items to solve increasingly complex environmental puzzles, and open the portal to the next level. I found this to be a very enjoyable title, with eye-catching graphics, cute characters, and challenging enough puzzles that tested my thinking skills without being frustratingly difficult. Let’s dive in and explore some key gameplay features.

You’ll play as Telly, an adorable little robot who witnesses his grandpa being kidnapped from his laboratory in the trunk of an evil robot’s car. Fortunately, Telly’s grandpa is able to communicate with him through a radio that you helped him uncover in Level 1, and can give helpful hints along the way. With his guidance, you and Telly must work your way through various scenes, hopping through portal after portal, to track down his grandpa and save him from the bad guys. You’ll be able to unlock other cute robot characters to play with, but Telly remained my favorite little avatar throughout the journey.

As you hop through each portal at the end of a level, you and Telly will be met with a new beautifully rendered 3D mini-world, which can be rotated all around, zoomed in on, and manipulated. Interact with all the various sections around the scene to uncover useful items like cranks, keys, data disks, and other bits and pieces to use within that level. Once all the items in a level have been unlocked, you’ll play one of 6 mini-games to open the final portal and beat the level. These mini-games are small spatial logic type puzzles, which add a nice bit of variety to the game flow. As an extra element, find all the batteries hidden around each scene to earn full rewards after solving the level, but don’t worry if you miss one, you can always go back and replay a level to get the completion bonus. There are 60 levels in total, including alternative scenes, which are variations on a scene you already played, and boss fights in the last level of each chapter, to keep you busy for quite some time.

In addition to the regular gameplay progressing you through the story levels, you can play any of the 6 mini-games that you’ve unlocked in the Arcade section from the home base screen. Level up in each mini-game to test your skills as they get progressively trickier. You’ll also find a Quests section in the home base, where you can do missions to unlock new robot characters, and daily challenges to earn rewards like energy and arcade tokens. After you’ve unlocked new characters, you can customize them by swapping heads, bodies, and legs, as well as changing their base and accent colors to suit your tastes. These customizations only change the aesthetics of a character and don’t impact gameplay, so this is a totally optional feature. Lastly, there’s a store section that awards you with a free chest filled with energy every few hours, and the option to purchase bundles of energy and tokens, as well as paying to go ad-free.

I really enjoyed playing Tiny Robots: Portal Escape, and plan on checking out the previous puzzle titles from Snapbreak on my own time. As a free-to-play game, I found it well worth the time it took to watch ads after each level, but you do have the option to pay to avoid those if you want. Telly is a very cute little robot, and the tiny worlds I explored through each portal with him were gorgeous and engaging. I’d highly recommend playing this game for yourself, either on Android or iOS, with a version for Steam coming soon. If you’d like to see a few minutes of gameplay, check out my YouTube video for a walkthrough of the 1^st couple story levels, and a brief look at all the home base sections.