RoboForge Review

Thinking up and tweaking your robots in RoboForge offers a lot of challenge, replay value, and entertainment.

New Zealand's Liquid Edge Games has a novel proposition for you: Instead of always having to shell out money to play computer games, how about getting paid in return, too? The company's new game, RoboForge, might let you do just that. Building on the battling robot craze popularized by shows such as Robot Wars and BattleBots, RoboForge lets you design your own mechanical warriors that compete in online gladiatorial tournaments. Win one of the advanced tournaments, and you could potentially earn around $10,000. The money won't come easily, though: RoboForge is an intellectually demanding game that calls to mind school science-fair projects more than battling anime mechs. While destruction plays its part in the game, RoboForge is really about construction.

RoboForge lets you design your very own fighting robot...
RoboForge lets you design your very own fighting robot...

RoboForge stands at the confluence of some interesting gaming trends. Liquid Edge is one of a new breed of independent game designers that sell their offerings directly through the Internet, bypassing publishers. They've also created RoboForge with Java, the programming language behind a lot of what you see on the Web, one that more game developers are beginning to embrace. Last but hardly least, Liquid Edge is combining the pay-to-play online gaming model with professional gaming, requiring fees of around $5 to enter advanced tournaments that offer monetary prizes.

To get to these tournaments, you'll first have to do some hard but entertaining work. RoboForge follows in the footsteps of CogniToy's acclaimed game, MindRover: The Europa Project, released a couple of years ago. Like MindRover, RoboForge is ultimately less a game in the traditional sense and more a virtual robot construction set--and a sophisticated one at that. You'll spend the great majority of your time creating your robots, adjusting their combat moves and artificial intelligence, and then testing them offline. The actual online combat is something of a sideshow and a letdown by comparison.

You build your robots with a graphical editor that lets you easily express your creativity. You get a number of basic component classes to work with, each with a decent selection of items to choose from. Self-recharging generators power your robot, and a controller, or CPU brain, lets it interact with its environment and enemies. Controllers are rated in computations per second, and multiple, parallel controllers allow for speedier processing. When choosing your robot's external sensors, you need to balance their range and field of view. A variety of shields and armor help decrease damage. Swivel, ball, radial, and telescopic joints let you add a range of different appendages.

...and watch it fight against computer- or player-built rivals.
...and watch it fight against computer- or player-built rivals.

When you get to the business end of your bot, which are its weapons, you can choose from a decent range of melee armaments such as jackhammers, rams, claws, axes, and scythes. Few of these are very colorful or original, and you don't get any ranged weapons. Interestingly, a weapon's damage capability is primarily determined by its weight multiplied by striking velocity, with a bonus added for certain weapons. Physics matter more than any sci-fi wishful thinking in RoboForge.

Each component adds to the total build cost of your robot. Since tournaments have maximum price cutoffs, you'll have to choose components carefully to stay under the limit. Adding on that deluxe radial saw you've been dreaming of will mean less money for energy or shields, for instance. Component weight affects your building decisions too: Do you pick slow-moving, energy-guzzling, heavy components with lots of hit points, or do you choose speed over armor? If all these choices sound like a bit much, the "bot wizard" feature lets you quickly throw together a robot based on provided templates--but then you'll be skipping the heart of the game and will probably end up with a weak (and losing) creation.

Once you've weighed your options, assembled your robot, and painted it with a few easy-to-use tools, you'll program its combat moves and AI. Moves use a "snapshot" metaphor--here, as you would with an animator, you manipulate your 3D robot into a series of poses and take a sequence of pictures of it. The game then fills in the blanks between shots to create a smooth motion. In conjunction with your robot's sensors, you define 3D zones that determine how your creation will interact with its world and enemies: If an enemy is detected in a forward zone, for example, you can make your robot advance and perform an attack move you've recorded.

Designing your robot is a complex but streamlined process.
Designing your robot is a complex but streamlined process.

To do that, you incorporate the moves into the robot's AI. You program it by using a decision tree with custom or predesigned routines that allow your robot to analyze and react to its situation. If you want to really get under the hood and tweak things, you can design more complex subroutines with a fairly robust scripting language. Designing the AI will give you a good mental workout, though RoboForge streamlines the procedure to make it fairly accessible, too. Either way, it's a lot of work to design a credible robot that can react to a wide range of threats.

After your AI work is done, it's off to battle. First, you'll want to test your creation extensively offline against some sample bots. You'll almost certainly need to go back and tweak moves and AI. Satisfied that your robot stands a chance in a real battle, you then go online and join impromptu challenges and progressively harder tournaments, viewing the recorded matches after the fact with a VCR-like control. These fights usually last just a few minutes, as robots try to wear down each other's hit points. As in MindRover, you don't actually control anything during the fights; you just sit back and watch to see who's the better designer/programmer. RoboForge keeps the focus squarely on intellectualism instead of action.

RoboForge really puts your creativity and ingenuity to the test.
RoboForge really puts your creativity and ingenuity to the test.

The game's solid but hardly stunning presentation reinforces the cerebral emphasis. The menus are clean and attractive, and the provided robot parts allow varied humanoid, insectile, and machinelike designs. Apparently, these are supposed to be designed by different species with meaningless names such as Cytol and Srikar. In a failed attempt to create a cool sci-fi atmosphere, weapons carry equally weird monikers, like Myctlans Tongue. Slow and jerky animations make the combat pretty tedious to watch. Cheesy, synthesized robot voices don't give the bots any memorable personality. Bland sound effects (and pops from when they loop) do nothing for the game, either. The robots, the arenas in which they battle, and the combat itself just lack the "coolness" factor you'd really like to see in a battling robots game.

Despite that real flaw, thinking up and tweaking your robots offers a lot of challenge, replay value, and entertainment. RoboForge certainly isn't for impatient gamers or anyone just looking to blow off steam after a long day of school or work. Get ready to invest some real time, energy, and thought into this one. Then again, the reward for your hard work may be money instead of just intellectual satisfaction. That raises the question, though, of whether gaming should become even more money-oriented than it already is. Waving a fistful of dollars in front of prospective game buyers seems a little base. Also, look at the widespread cheating in games that don't promise monetary rewards. It looks like there might be an enticement for abuse with this sort of system. While innovative business models might be beneficial to gaming, it's still better to lure gamers with solid gameplay instead of money. RoboForge, despite some significant weaknesses, has more than enough solid gameplay to go around.

The Good

  • N/A

The Bad

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