Bot Vice is a gallery shooter from DYA Games where you play Erin Saver, an ex-cop with a bionic arm and a grudge against a gang of robots called the Wildbots.
Picture a carnival shooting gallery. You’re stuck at the bottom, you slide left and right, and you plink the targets popping up in front of you.
Now hand every one of those targets a gun.
That’s Bot Vice. The whole game is you pinned behind the counter of a shooting gallery where the ducks shoot back.
It’s hard. Plenty of people bounce off it in the first ten minutes and call it unfair.
It isn’t unfair. You’re just fighting it instead of learning it. These are the tips I wish someone had handed me before I started dying to the same stage over and over.
Aiming is automatic, so stop worrying about it
The first thing that trips people up is that you don’t actually aim in Bot Vice.
Erin’s gun locks onto enemies on its own. You hold the fire button and she targets whatever’s in front of her.
That sounds like it makes the game easier. It doesn’t.
What it means is that Bot Vice isn’t really a shooting game, it’s a dodging game with a gun attached.
Your hands are free to do the part that matters: moving, rolling, ducking behind cover, and swapping weapons. Put your attention there.
If you came in expecting to line up careful shots, drop that habit now. The game is picking your targets for you. Your job is staying alive long enough to keep pulling the trigger.
Learn the dodge roll before anything else
When Erin rolls, she’s invincible for the length of the roll. Bullets pass right through her.
That roll is your get-out-of-jail button, and it’s the most important move in the game.
Somebody dumps a wall of projectiles into your lane? Roll through it. A frog bot leaps at your face? Roll out from under it.
The whole trick is timing. Roll too early and you finish the animation before the bullets arrive, then you eat them standing still.
Watch the shot, wait a beat, then roll as it reaches you. It clicks fast once you stop panic-rolling the second anything moves.
Cover is temporary, so treat it that way
There’s a row of destructible objects along the bottom of the screen. Cars, crates, that sort of stuff.
You can duck behind them to eat shots. Handy.
Here’s the catch. That cover breaks, and the enemies are the ones breaking it.
Every object in front of you is on a timer. Some bots, like the cone-shaped ones, will chip away at your cover even when you’re standing up.
Crouching behind cover also tends to draw more fire onto the cover itself. So use it to survive a nasty moment, then move again.
Don’t plant yourself behind a car and expect it to babysit you for the whole stage.
You set the pace, not the game
Bot Vice feeds you enemies in waves.
Here’s the part most beginners miss: a new wave doesn’t show up until you’ve cleared the one in front of you.
That means you control the tempo. The game waits on you.
Down to the last enemy in a wave and your health is low? Stop shooting for a second. Reposition, catch your breath, pick your spot.
The stage isn’t going anywhere until you drop that last bot, so there’s no reason to rush yourself into a bad spot.
Kill enemies to earn better weapons
You start every stage with a basic handgun. It has infinite ammo and it’s fine, but it’s slow.
The better weapons drop from little birds that fly in with new waves.
See the loop? No kills means no new waves, and no new waves means no weapon drops.
If you turtle in the corner, you’re stuck fighting bosses with the starter pistol.
So even when you’re scared, keep clearing enemies. That’s the only way to earn the good stuff, and you’ll want to grab every drop you can reach.
Learn what each weapon is actually for
Once you’ve got weapons, know what they do. Everything except the handgun has limited ammo, so don’t waste it.
The machine gun fires fast. It’s your workhorse for shredding groups in a hurry.
The spread gun throws a wide shot, which is great when enemies are strung out across the screen.
The flame gun is a short-range flamethrower. Nasty up close, useless at range.
The rocket launcher and grenades hit the hardest. Save those for bosses and the moments where the screen is about to bury you.
Match the gun to the mess in front of you, and don’t blow your rockets on a couple of easy grunts.
The energy saber isn’t a gimmick
Erin also has an energy saber, and a lot of players forget it’s even there.
It does two jobs. Up close it does real damage. And it slices enemy bullets right out of the air.
That second part is the reason to care about it.
The Fish Bots that show up later spam slow-moving bubbles all over your lane. The saber cuts straight through them.
It takes timing, so it’s not something you lean on against fast projectiles. But for slow junk crowding your space, a well-timed swing clears a path nothing else can.
Know which bots to shoot first
Not every bot on screen is an equal threat. Part of getting good is learning who to kill first.
The cone bots wreck your cover, so deal with them the moment you’re relying on that cover.
The frog bots hop across the screen and land right on you, and they’re easy to ignore until one’s in your face.
The Fish Bots flood your lane with bubbles. Chargers barrel straight down at you. The flying ones bounce around and pepper you while you’re busy with everything else.
Kill the thing that’s about to hurt you, not the thing that’s easiest to hit.
You learn the roster by dying to it. Every death shows you which bot ruined your run, and next time you shoot that one first.
Bosses have patterns, so keep some heavy ammo
Every stage ends in a boss, and bosses run on patterns.
You’ll lose to a boss the first time. That’s the game teaching you the pattern, and on the second try you already know what’s coming.
Walk into a boss with some rocket or grenade ammo saved. Chipping one down with the handgun is slow, and slow gives it more time to kill you.
Don’t dump everything in the first five seconds either. Learn the openings, dodge the big attacks, then spend your heavy ammo when the boss is wide open.
The clock and the rank are the real game
Here’s the thing nobody tells you going in. Bot Vice runs on a clock.
You start the campaign with a time budget, a little under 40 minutes, to reach the final showdown. Every stage feeds a running timer.
Burn too much time on the early stages and the later ones stay locked. You literally can’t reach the end.
The fix is that you can replay any stage you’ve already beaten to post a faster clear and bank the extra seconds.
The level select is color-coded so you can spot which stages have the most room to improve. Go back to your ugly clears, run them cleaner, and buy yourself time for the back half.
Each stage also hands you a letter rank based mostly on how fast you cleared it, so quick, clean runs feed the rank and the clock at the same time.
Erin never levels up. You do. Every replay is you getting faster, not her getting stronger.
Change these settings before you rage quit
Before you decide the game hates you, go mess with the options.
Start on Rookie. There are three difficulties, Rookie, Warrior, and Insane, and there’s zero shame in the easy one while you’re learning. Bump it up later.
Then rebind the controls. A lot of people bounce off Bot Vice purely because the default layout feels awful.
Holding fire and aim at the same time gets uncomfortable fast. If you’ve got a controller or an arcade stick, set the buttons up so shooting and rolling feel natural to your hands.
It’s a different game once the controls stop fighting you.
It clicks once you stop panicking
Bot Vice is a game you lose to a lot before it starts making sense. That’s normal. That’s the whole genre.
Stop treating it like a shooter and start treating it like a dance. Move, roll, duck, swap guns, repeat.
If this kind of movement-first shooter is your thing, a lot of the same instincts carry straight over to something like Minishoot Adventures.
Once the panic drops and the patterns show up, you’ll be clearing stages you couldn’t survive an hour ago. And the ducks that shoot back start looking less scary.
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Images in this article are from the Bot Vice page on Steam and used under Fair Use.