- Robot Arena
The year is 2001. There’s a burgeoning sport on the cusp of exploding in popularity: robot combat. Radio controlled menaces sporting flippers, hammers, chainsaws and more itching to destroy their opponents and leave them a smouldering wreck in the middle of an arena whose walls are made from bulletproof glass. The rise of robot combat is largely due in part to a little show named BattleBots airing on, of all things, Comedy Central in the United States. Robot Wars, the European counterpart to BattleBots, had been airing on the BBC for several years by now but it was BattleBots that arguably put the sport on the map and someone was bound to chase that rush by releasing a video game.
Enter Gabriel Interactive, a brand new developer with a team of about seven people and high aspirations. Ostensibly comprised of bot fans themselves Gabriel Interactive’s first foray into game development was 2001’s Robot Arena. Fans could now live out their metal crunching fantasies on their computers by way of one of the very first robot combat games ever created. That’s what makes Robot Arena so special; there were no other games to really build upon and take inspiration from. These neophyte game developers were tasked not just with making a robot combat game but also coming up with the design conventions behind making the game work. A tall order and the end result is something that can be looked back upon fondly despite its flaws.
Right away Robot Arena launches you to an opening menu with a few options: Player, Bot Lab, and Arena. Because the game cannot function with empty tables there’s a “New Player” already filled in on the title screen but you can either change its name or make a new player and delete the placeholder. It’s little things such as this that reveal just how green Gabriel Interactive really was when approaching this game. That said the Bot Lab is probably where you’ll spend most of your time in this game because as the name implies it’s here where your devilish machines will (mostly) become reality.
Robot Arena is a simple affair. You start with $1,000 in your profile and from here you have to build a competitive machine capable of tackling the game’s Tournament mode. Unfortunately $1,000 is barely just enough money to build yourself a cheap ram-bot with the most inexpensive armor, wheels, and batteries. If you’re not aware of this you’ll promptly run out of funds and discover that selling your parts back to the Bot Lab doesn’t offer a 1:1 return on what you paid for them; you’ll probably have to delete your profile and make a new one to start over to get another one grand. The money system is probably the worst aspect of Robot Arena because newcomers to the game won’t have a complete picture on what it takes to build a robot and all of the required components will bankrupt them unless they do things on the cheap right out of the gate. It’s easy to be sidetracked with all the other parts and weapons on offer.
Combat in Robot Arena is super basic. The best way to describe it is two cars fighting for a parking spot. There are no physics to speak of in Robot Arena, your rams and slams won’t cause your opponents to spin out nor will your buzz saws trip them up and send them into the air like on the TV shows of the era. There was a configuration file tweak that Gabriel Interactive shared on their website that would “turn on” collisions but as far as testing is concerned this didn’t actually do anything. It’s a shame too because there were some robot components cut from the game that implied physics would play a major role in the fights such as the remnants of an articulated forklift attachment. Creative users can still get this item to be made available in the game but it doesn’t do anything as it has no programming assigned to it. Still, these tweaks and missing parts hinted toward something greater that Gabriel Interactive had planned for their game, something that would eventually be realized in Robot Arena’s sequel, Robot Arena: Design & Destroy.
The game’s Tournament mode sees you fighting your robots to the death against other AI controlled opponents for high stakes cash, cash that can be spent making necessary repairs to your robot in the Bot Lab or just building a completely new robot entirely. The first opponent awards you more money than you started the game with so you could either beef out your ram-bot or sell all the parts and chase something a little more devious. Sadly once you complete Tournament mode there’s no way to go back and play it again; selecting the option shows you the “Tournament Completed” screen and a picture of a trophy. From here the only way to win more money is to use the game’s Custom Challenges option where you can choose one of your robots and pick from any of the competitiors and then make a wager on the fight. If you win the fight you win what you wagered, simple as that. There’s no fanfare or anything to work toward however so this part of the game just feels like a trudge. It’s much easier to just open the Bot Lab and press “$” which instantly awards you $50,000 and essentially the ability to construct whatever you can dream up.
Robot Arena is not a perfect game, in fact there’s a lot wrong with it and at many points it leaves something to be desired. But for a debut game from a brand new studio you can’t help but applaud Gabriel Interactive for their efforts. They took a real chance on this game that could’ve easily gone bust and it paid off well enough that a sequel to the game was immediately greenlit. Fans of robot combat can enjoy this game as something of a novelty, a relic of a bygone era where everything in the sport was simpler. Even the games. ■
