The app title immediately induced flashbacks to the late 90s television phenomenon Robot Wars, where teams of well-meaning Dads and awkward sons pitted their garage-made creations against each other while the eternally irritating Craig Charles cackled and blathered away in the background. Thankfully, Walking War Robots, the fearsome new gaming app from ace developer Pixonic, is very far removed from the aforementioned Saturday evening family fare peddled by the BBC. In short, it’s epic.
The premise is uncompicated. You pilot a two-legged mechanical monster and charge into battle against other armoured robots, with the objective of reducing them to smouldering metal. Refreshingly, there’s no back story or exposition to sit and click through; there’s just big robots with chainguns and that’s the end of it, alright? The most crucial feature of the game is also its best asset. It’s an MMO, a massively multiplayer online game, currently the hot ticket of the global gaming community. And for good reason; MMO is buckets of fun. No CPU experience can beat the thrills and spills of battling against faceless people from all across the world, and Walking War Robots is no different. In MMO, the twin emotions of camaraderie and competitiveness are heightened to significant degrees, a side effect made all the more effective by WWR’s seamless online play. There’s no lag here. You hit ‘play’ and BAM, you’re in the middle of some dusty old desert, arming your turret guns and marching forward with your new found brothers in arms to face down a team of enemy machines on the horizon.
It’s pretty engaging stuff. Luckily the graphics and controls can match the exciting gameplay hook. The sound design is on point. Pixonic has obviously put a lot of man hours into their creation, with their attention to detail shining through to win the day. The 3D landscapes and robots are rendered gorgeously. The controls are simple and intuitive. Thankfully, the bullets actually hit the thing you’ve targeted, while the maps are easy to navigate but varied enough to retain interest. The real test of these kind of games is longevity, which the developers address in this case by offering varied levels of customisation. The Japanese long ago discovered that the customisation factor was a crucial part of a game’s package, so I’m glad to see that Walking War Robots doesn’t shy away from this aspect. There’s eleven robot types to choose from, and fourteen weapons to equip them with. They’re not all available from the get go, but your continued war efforts are rewarded with currency which allow you to unlock the big guns, so to speak. Already blisteringly popular amongst the iOS gaming community, Walking War Robots comes highly recommended for those seeking exciting, ammunition-laden multiplayer fun.
Download Walking War Robots on iTunes for free.
