Tommyspud's Quick Look/Review - Robot Arena 2

I know my last blog was on some of my favorite battlebots matches. Kind of ties together with this one. Robot Arena is a two-game series where the general basis is imitating Robot Combat. The game was released in February 2003, and is currently a dead series because no one bought the rights when Infogrames went under.

At least that's what should've been. It should've been dead.


Yeah right.

So, the game has a pretty big fan community, both in the custom bots and IRL bots, like both Toe Crusher and Wedge of Doom seen here. These are AI bots, you don't get to play as them(unless you do a few bits of tweaking). Your thing is to make your own bot to compete against these bad boys.

Most people will straight up make a heavyweight bot.... Mainly because lower weight classes are hard to make stuff for. Middleweight was a decent challenge to make a bot for, and lightweight... well... to put it simply, I only used 8 pieces and BARELY fit under the limit.


Lightweight bot of Destiny. One battery, one control chip, two wheels, two engines on the wheels, the spike and the spike holder. It stabs like a champ, plus it still flips others over and can drive upside down. A lot of the lightweight bots either have some type of spinning attack, can flip others, or shove you around.

Which means old Stabby Mcgee can actually do well against some of those bots. That's not it's actual name.

The AI will attempt it's best to come and destroy you. Usually it battles straight up, not trying to pull sneaky tricks or anything. Sometimes a charging enemy will make you want to run for the hills, because it's got a spinning blade that will cut up your bot in an instant. I'm looking at you, Hazard. It's all about taking your shots or building a bot that can play defense so you don't have to move much.

There's also some online play that you could attempt doing, but as a whole, it's a fun game that's worth a look. It's running for free at www.gametechmods.com where you can get both the vanilla and the DSL2 versions as full downloads, as well as several different AI packs(I'm using a battlebots pack). It's something fun and probably the best robot combat game made.

Quick rating: 8/10