Murder Drones: Dark And Hilarious Sci-Fi

Some of the videos contain animated violence and gore, scary imagery, and possibly swearing.

Murder Drones Is Precisely The Show I Expected

If you were tracking—as I was—the creative output of Liam Vickers on YouTube, then Murder Drones seems the obvious next step. His various shorts and series ideas have been culminating to this. It has all his hallmarks: an irreverent and meta sense of humor, a love of psychotic and murderous female characters, and a penchant for aggressively sharp monster designs. 

But finally, we get to see what he can do with a larger budget for one of his ideas, and a full episode length to explore his stories. But, before we talk about the plot and its pieces, we must talk about that CGI animation. It’s…interesting. Liam’s frankly amazing at 2D stuff, but the technical restraints here shows—and shows a lot. 

Murder Drones Animation Is Sometimes A Little Off

But I think it’s a massive credit to Liam and his team that despite the wonky animation, it’s still vastly entertaining to watch—especially the comedy. Murder Drones is, frankly, hilarious. Its jokes break the worldbuilding sometimes, but the background details, the posters, the little facial animations are just all clever, witty, and hilarious. The angsty teenage main character having to load “Edge Levels” because they were “critically low” is the exact humor style I can vibe with wholeheartedly. It helps balance out the oil gore and the violence. It allows you to care about characters while not being overly sad if one dies. 

Every Individual Joke In This First Episode Lands

This brings us to our two mains, and how fun they are. Uzi, the aforementioned teenage robot, and N, a titular Murder Drone, make for an excellent comedic duo. Having a rebellious teen main character is sometimes an insufferable choice, but Uzi is the right level of self-aware to carry this type of story. She has clear goals and somehow can be both comical, mildly deranged, and the only sane person in the room as the story continues. Then we have N. He works perfectly as a sidekick and somewhat blank slate. He’s overpowered but incompetent and has a lot of monstrous aspects that should be fun to see play out in various plot ways. 

Between this and Helluva Boss, we seem to be getting a sort of renaissance for indie animated series, and I’m excited for it. At the time of writing, Murder Drones is steadily closing in on two million views, and I hope it continues to climb. Its pilot episode is hilarious, fun, and though the future in the show is dark, I don’t think it will be for this awesome series.

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