Robot Arena 2: Design and Destroy
Initial release date: February 18, 2003 Developer: Gabriel Interactive, Inc. Publisher: Infogrames Entertainment SA Platform: Microsoft Windows Robot Arena 2 gives you ability to design and build your own combat robot. You have the ability to shape the body yourself, and freely place drive motors, weapons and batteries as well as being able to map your own controls to suit your needs. The game contains multiple modes, including: arcade, multiplayer and career mode. Multiplayer is self explanatory, while arcade mode provides you with non-competitive battles with multiples modes, including 1 on 1, annihilators and sumo. The career mode allow you to compete against the computer using your own robot in different tournament with the ultimate aim to score the most points of a single season. Points are awarded depending on how you fare in the individual tournaments, I.e. a first place finish will obviously offer more than if you are knocked out in the first round. The computer has access to multiple teams, with each of the teams offering different opponents with lots of variation in the type of robot you will have to face. Each team has 3 robots in 3 separate weight classes, lightweight, middleweight and heavyweight. The weight of your built robot will obviously determine which set of robots you may have to face. This all sounds great and is pretty much what I would expect many combat robot fans would want in a robot game, however the game does contain various issues and bugs. I feel the main problem with the robot building itself, is that the game is very limited in terms of parts to use for example, there is only a handful of burst motors available to fire flippers and axes. On the topic of weapons, there is again very limited weaponry and parts to use. This means you most likely won't be able to achieve the vision you had when you started building the robot. More issues arise due to the havoc engine, which creates a game breaking in the form of "the havoc explosion". The havoc explosion essentially causes your robot to fly off around the arena, normally resulting in you being defeated, whenever a burst motor is unable to close (for example a flipper getting stuck open on top of an opposing robot). This issue has been fixed in a recent mod however it has plagued the vanilla version since release. Another problem I have with the game is how most weapons you build are ineffective due to the game itself, for example flippers are useless due to the burst motors not having enough power. This again makes it so you are forced down other routes in terms of how you build your robot, instead of the player having total control. The saving grace for Robot arena 2 is the modding community. The game today still maintains a small but dedicated modding community (13 years on) which most games can't claim they have. The modding community take the game to a new level, with new motors and components available, new arena's and the inclusion of famous real life robots. These improvements have kept me playing the game over the past few years, as I now have the ability to build a robot much closer to how I wanted originally with the new motors being more than up to the job and throwing robot clean into the air and taking other robots apart in one hit due to increased speed and damage of axes and spinning disc. Some of the mods are not without their faults however, for example the mod I play has very overpowered flippers, and axes and spinner's do more damage to themselves unless you are an excellent driver. In terms of the Vanilla game I'd give it a 5/10, for it's time it’s a solid game, however it has too many bugs and flaws for me to be able to rank it higher, even though it is probably the best combat robot building game made so far. I'm going to give the modded version of the game a separate score though as the mods make it a completely different game. I'd give the modded game an 8/10, it becomes the game I always wanted, the ability to launch other robots clean into the air and smash them to pieces as I choose fit. Thanks for reading and let me know what you think of the review and the game itself.
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