BOTwaR

BOTwaR Review

by on January 22, 2013

BOTwaR is an unassuming little game offering you the ability to pit robots against each other, but with a twist: you yourself program them to determine how they behave in the arena. This is both its strength and weakness, since your robots can only be as good as your programming talent.

This means its market is predestined to be niche and if you’re not a programmer, we won’t beat about the bush – this game isn’t for you.

If you are, however, it’s a casual, mildly entertaining title with some replay value. Improving your robots’ performance incrementally can be engaging and good for your programming skills, but eventually you begin to wonder how your own bots would fare against other humans’ commands. Sadly, that’s doomed to remain unanswered, since there’s no way of sharing your bots with other players or opportunity to pit them against your pals’ creations over Game Center – when you’re restricted to setting your own creations against each other, it starts to feel more like a toy than a game.

BOTwaR doesn’t try looking pretty because that isn’t what it’s about. Visually, it has one job to do that it does without fuss: the robots are represented as coloured circles, and the game offers the ability to toggle their names. If you have more than three or four on screen at once, you might need that: it’s a little easy to lose one particular robot among the mêlée.

As for the programming itself, you’re given several events (e.g. wasHit(), isMoving(), getX(), getY() and so on) and commands, such as fire() to shoot, or ping() to find other bots. You also have the JavaScript Math object to play with, and the preloaded bots are a fair demonstration of how to get started. Typing out functions on the smaller iPhone keyboard, however, can be laborious – you’re much better suited to doing this on an iPad.

Download this app: BOTwaR for iPhone

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Review courtesy of Tap!