In this game you are a robot dropped into a battlefield playing on the yellow team against the blue robots. Ok, there’s not much of a story line, the Egyptian theme kind of works for the vector graphics of pyramids and monuments but essentially this is a run around a 3D environment blowing up things, laying and avoiding traps but as you get into it there is a fair bit of strategy involved. There are two ways to win this game, either kill all the opposition robots or take over the battlefield by having more control towers.
Your weapons will do more damage in an area where you have more control, but you need to venture into uncontrolled areas to destroy your enemy’s towers. There are three robots to choose from each have their own specific weapons that you can have delivered to your location by the mother ship that flies over the playing field. There are also bonuses items lying around the battlefield to help you in your quest to defeat the other team, all robots can use all the bonus items, which include traps, teleport, stealth, invincibility and x-ray vision etc. You will need to do a short bit of reading to learn your controls and what all of the bonuses do but it won’t take long
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before you can get into the action. Initially this is a one on one battle but soon you will find you have allies and as the difficulty increases the odds start to be stacked against you and the opposition does get tougher to kill in higher levels. One of the best things I found about this game is the shield system, robots can be repaired and shields can’t so you need to decide when to use your shield, and having a shield that’s half shot to bits hinders your visibility considerably.
Also the robots take damage to different body parts so you can decide to take out their guns first, or his backpack to stop him flying off, or just go for the head which is a sure kill but small target. Strategy also involves what weapons or bonuses to carry (you are limited to 6 at a time), where to hide and protect towers, do you destroy a repair station or booby trap it instead? The battlefields don’t vary a lot in look, there are some nice additions in later levels but I still like the first one best. The only drawback I found was the controls, the creators recommend joystick which is fine if you can customize your joystick to fit around 30 commands, otherwise you will still need to use the keyboard or mouse occasionally.
Still, I was just as happy using number pad and mouse, which allows better accuracy when shooting, both have their advantages. My kids also like this game and since the violence is fairly tame I don’t mind them playing it (it’s clearly only robots not people getting blown up).
