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Home : Games : Previews : RoboBlitz
New action/puzzle game for PC and Xbox 360 Live Arcade shows promise.
Sometimes robots get to save the world too. Just look at R2-D2, onecould argue that the little astromech droid with the bizarre electroniclanguage is the real hero of the Star Wars saga.
In RoboBlitz, a new game from Naked Sky Entertainment,gamers will get a chance to see what it feels like to be a little bottrying to save his own world from what the company refers to as “a bandof maladjusted space pirates.”
RoboBlitz puts players in the role of Blitz, a robot who isworking toward activating an old defensive “space cannon” in order tofight off the aforementioned pirates. Doing so will be no easy task asthe player is faced with nineteen levels of physics-driven puzzleswhich stand between Blitz and his objective.
Interestingly, RoboBlitz started life as a technicaldemo for Intel that ran at the 2005 Game Developer’s Conference (GDC).Its original intent was simply to show off the capabilities of Intelprocessors and Nvidia video cards. When conference attendees tooknotice and started asking when the game would be released, Naked Skydecided to morph their demo into a full-fledged game.
The game uses the Unreal 3 engine and, by the look of thesescreenshots, puts it to good use in terms of graphics. The environmentsare vast and detailed, albeit a bit clichéd in a sci-fi sense, and theparticle effects look pretty darn good from what we see here. Naked skypromises all of this will be a less than 50MB download from Xbox LiveArcade.
As for the gameplay itself, we haven’t had a chance to get ourhands on it yet, but the game itself will be available via Xbox LiveArcade and Steam this week. Naked Sky says that gamers will “have touse both their brain lobes” to solve the many puzzles presented. In aninterview posted in June on Xbox Circle, RoboBlitzlead programmer Josh Glazer gave some information on the game, whichhad been presented at GDC a few months earlier. Glazer discussed manyfacets of the game, especially the physics-driven gameplay.
“There's no hand animation for the characters,” Glazer said,“all the movement you see, even of Blitz and the Baddies, is allcontrolled by physical simulation. There's no animator planning out,‘Blitz should roll like this and when he stops, sway a little to theleft and then move his arm like this,’ etc. Instead, it's the designerswho say, ‘Blitz is this fast, and he has motors here and here that havethis range of motion and this strength,’ and then the programmers buildit in. As a result, you get a lot of emergent movements for thecharacters, with their bodies reacting to the environment as they bumpinto it, roll over it, and blow it up.”
This aspect of RoboBlitz makes the game particularlyinteresting, as the characters’ movements and abilities are linkeddirectly to real-world physical laws. Because these laws affect notjust Blitz and his sidekick Karl, but every object in the environment,there is often more than one possible solution (and sometimes many) toany given puzzle.
“For instance, there's a simple puzzle where you haveto rotate a platform to get it into the correct position. It's a heavyplatform, designed so that you have to figure out how to get enoughtorque to line it up right. However, as soon as we started testing thepuzzle, people were finding all sorts of alternative methods to line upthe platform,” Glazer told Xbox Circle, “Every puzzle is going to besolvable in many ways, and if you come up with a solution for which wedidn’t plan, it's still going to work, because everything is driven byphysics.”
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