RoboFighters

The human form really isn’t a practical design for a robot. Those rather pointless Robo Sapien toys the shops are desperately trying to get rid of and the expensive Honda spaceman thing that falls over on the stairs pretty much prove that.

It’s not practical unless you intend to make these giant mechanical men fight to the death, in which case the machines have the necessary bits and bytes for a bout. RoboFighters combines all the pugilistic elements we’ve come to expect from towering, slap-happy mechs, along with a couple of additional training methods to hone your robo fighting skills.

The bulk of the game is built around a simple one-on-one grudge match between yourself and a near-identical opponent. The robots and their arenas are all fully 3D, and without much texturing. It all still looks quite nice, however, as the plain colours actually lend the robots something of a fresh off the assembly line veneer.

Movement is entirely controlled via the accelerometer, which also does its job admirably. Aiming at the same time would be very difficult, given the way the robots tend to wander around a bit when the handset’s not held perfectly level, so an auto-aiming system takes up the slack.

Unfortunately, it compensates a little too much. Shooting is a matter of getting your opponent on screen, then jabbing at the fire button until your gun overheats. You need to keep moving, since the competition is tough and reasonably intelligent. Computer-controlled fighters make good use of obstacles dotted around the arenas for cover and it becomes apparent from their tactics that you need to do the same.

One nice touch to the gameplay - joining the propensity for your guns to overheat - is a fatigue system. You need to be quick on your mechanical toes, but the robots can only run around the place for so long before their batteries need recharging, so a strategy is no bad thing alongside fast feet.

Get close enough and the gun and grenade controls switch to attack and block with a laser sword. It's aspect of the game needs refining and barely works, particularly against advanced opponents. It could make for a great hand-to-hand combat mechanic with a lot more effort, but right now it’s not much more than an annoying novelty.

Mini-games punctuate the tit for tat jabs of tournament fighting. They take on something of a robo-athletics lilt with various road racing and sharp shooting tests to hone your skills. They don’t offer a great deal of variety, but the one-on-one fighting is a very limited affair, so the addition of the mini-games essentially doubles RoboFighters’s limited appeal.

Not that this is a bad game, by any means. It’s just very small. There’s some customisation of your robot (playing as defeated mechs, who you can repaint) and head-to-head multiplayer over local wi-fi, though the fighting just as limited (perhaps the sword fighting is better matched, since your opponent might be more willing to duke it out where the CPU apparently isn’t).

And as much as these are supposed to be giant robots, there’s a distinctly miniscule feeling to the whole thing. Perhaps it’s the limited gameplay or the plain colours, but this feels more like you’re battling toy robots than giant ones.

For a few moments of kitsch fun, RoboFighters works, but it really doesn’t pack enough of a punch. The basics of a fun and fast gameplay are there, but without the depth of play to really back them up, the basics alone aren't enough to carry RoboFighters all that far.