RoboForge Review

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 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.

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.