RoboSport for Windows is an enjoyable, futuristic, tactical turn-based strategy game developed by Maxis Software in the early nineties. It was one of the first good network playable games and was renowned for its excellent multiplayer capabilities. It featured both hot seat and multi-computer play through a modem. The game is played from a top down perspective.
The premise of RoboSport offered the user five different types of robots, each with its own main weapon and special capabilities. The user must form a team of robots and partake in a series of “capture the flag” or “seek and destroy” style missions. On each turn, the user uses the interval to program and position his robots before setting them loose on the opposition. There is no arcade play at all in this game, making it one hundred percent pure strategy.
There are four levels of AI difficulty in the game, ranging from unbelievably poor to brutally murderous, which is an excellent option if no humans are available for play. The other team is considered defeated when either they are all destroyed or the preset mission has been completed. The missions are labelled as follows: Capture the Flag; Survival; Hostage; Baseball; and Treasure Hunt. With the five different missions and robots come eight varied types of weapons: burst, missile, zap, rifle, automatic, kamikaze, time bomb and grenade. Each of the five robots has different types of armour that offer it a different skill. For example, the stealth armour could not be seen by enemy robots unless the robot was occupying an adjacent tile or the stealth robot was in motion. There are twenty-four total battlefields that users will be able to turn their robots loose onto.
As mentioned above, the game is all strategy. While programming robots to move about the map and carry out orders, the user has to use sound tactical knowledge and a bit of luck to guess what the opposition is going to do and program his robots accordingly. At the end of the turn, the user can see the fruits of his brilliant militaristic prowess by watching as his robots carry out orders and hopefully outmanoeuvre and outgun the opposition, complete the goal, and win the mission.
RoboSport features a very user-friendly interface and has a very short learning curve. It is a light weight, beer and pretzels style of tactical strategy game and can be very enjoyable to play with a friend. It is a good, solid play and would be a satisfying download for just about any type of computer gamer.
Written by:
~dorento1
