The games casts the player as Chip, a robot 0.03 seconds late for work, and as such is stuck with mining a planetary system about to fall into the sun. Chip conscripts the locals, the titular meatbags, as miners in return for making sure they don't die from nightly robot attacks. Chip very quickly realises he needs more, and needs them to be better, so he starts cloning them with alien DNA and 'improving' them to be more efficient...or to have laser eyes.
Gameplay consists of real time segments where the player must build up a mining base and improve humans during the day, whilst at night a horde of robots will appear to try and destroy your base. You move Chip around the map to direct the meatbags to their resources and command the improvements to the base. Whilst you can slow down and speed up time, you cannot pause it completely. One of the main features is genetic engineering, achieved by ordering two creatures into a specific building and selecting which traits are to be used in the new 'human'. At the end of a mission, you can choose some of the surviving humans to come with you to the next level. Between these levels, the player is presented with a map of the solar system to select the next level. On this screen they can also upgrade their meatbags and their robot.
Freaking Meatbags contains examples of:
- Accidental Murder: When the boss robot introduces Chip to his assigned system, he says "Oh, and there are some squishy creatures that live there. Make sure they stay safe." This is punctuated by Chip accidentally squishing one to red paste, and then awkwardly apologising with "Oops."
- Action Bomb: One of the genetic "improvements" Chip can do to the humans is to make them explode on contact with the enemy robots.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Robots attack you every night from the moment you arrive. The fact that you too are a robot does not dissuade them from this at all. Flavour text says that they are terraforming bots.
- Played with in that you are essentially playing as one of AI that's so completely won over the humans it treats them
- Ambiguously Human: Your meatbags very quickly become less and less human as you experiment with genetics.
- Attack Drone: You can construct these at the Robot Factory.
- Critical Hit: Your troops' and turrets' attacks can score these.
- Cyber Cyclops: Bossbot has a single red eye, as he resembles HAL 9000 on a Monolith.
- Defeat Equals Explosion: The fate of the destroyed enemy robots. Or of your humans, if you fit them with the explosive "improvement".
- Flash of Pain: Enemy robots flash white for a few seconds after they got hit. Getting poisoned also makes them flash green.
- Gender Is No Object: The humans all have randomly generated names, which can be male or female. It changes nothing gameplay-wise, and makes no difference to Chip.
- Hover Board: Humans can be improved by giving them these. Then again, you can also equip them with...
- Jetpack: Another one of the cool and non-horrifying improvements you can make to the humans under your control. Allows them to get over rivers and other such obstacles.
- Universal Poison: You can build poison plates that work on the enemy robots...somehow. Perhaps it meant acid instead?
- You Are Number 6: Humans can have male names, female ones, or plain numbers like "130346". Given that the AI has advanced to a "treat humans as pets" stage at this point, their bearers probably see it as a way of getting closer to them.
