RoboQuest
Reviewed by Jason Levine
Published by Philips

Age Group: Age 8 and Up Type: Arcade Price: 38

Description:

Roboquest is a game that suffers from schizophrenia. Consider the plot: Evilla, the wicked witch, is mad because she can't have kids of her own. So she kidnaps all the kids in town and locks them in her castle dungeon. Your job is to construct a spell-casting robot (!) and guide it through the dungeon to rescue the kids. The problem with Roboquest, however, is not that the plot is so weird. After all, a certain game, to which Roboquest bears more than a passing resemblance, involves a space marine fighting supernatural creatures with nail guns and rocket launchers. So obviously a coherent plot isn't a prerequisite to a successful action-oriented game. No, the problem with Roboquest is that it can't seem to make up its mind which it wants to be, a robot construction set or Doom for kids.

Documentation and Installation

Roboquest's documentation is abysmal. It consists of an 11-page booklet, three pages of which are devoted to credits, tucked into the cover of the CD's jewel case. This booklet simply does not provide the minimum information needed to enjoy the program. For example, all the instructions for the construction set part of the program are crammed onto two pages. Buttons are labeled variously as "rotate about the x-axis" or "rotate about the z-axis." You are left to figure out for yourself that the robot's parts and the assembly can be rotated separately, and that it's necessary to do this in order to build the two better robots. I can see many kids giving up on this game in frustration even before they complete one robot simply because the documentation is so inadequate. The manual also contains at least one inaccuracy. It says that you must find the gold key to open the locked door that allows you to move from one level to the next in the castle maze. It also says that opening the locked door will allow you to enter the room where the crystal ball that holds the magic for advancing to the next level is hidden. In fact, the gold key unlocks an elevator that very un-magically moves to the next level and contains nothing resembling a crystal ball. Installation was straight-forward under Windows 95 and should be as simple under Win 3.1. However, be warned: Roboquest, like so many graphically-oriented games these days, is a hard drive hog. The recommended full installation takes up a whopping 92 MB, including the Direct X drivers. I chose the much more modest partial installation, which consumed 25 MB, including the Direct X drivers. The partial installation ran fine on my Pentium 120 with 16 MB RAM and 4X CD-ROM drive, but if you're running at the minimum 486-66 with 8 MB RAM and 2X CD- ROM, you might experience a real slowdown under the partial installation. An irritating aspect of the Direct X installation is that Roboquest does not check to see whether you already have the drivers, especially a more up-to-date version of the drivers, installed. It insists on installing its drivers or canceling the installation. Roboquest does not include an uninstall routine. It does not write to the Windows 95 Registry, however, so it can be removed simply by deleting the files.

Putting It Together

Simply put, the construction set portion of Roboquest is too limited. You can choose from only three robots to build, and the parts to each of the three are all predetermined. The complexity of the robot determines how strong it is in the castle maze, because the enemies in the maze steal or knock off the robot's parts. So the more parts the robot has, the more it can lose and remain functional. The construction screens are nicely rendered (once you figure them out without the manual's help). You can turn the parts and the assembly in any direction to get a better look at how a part should fit, and a preview window lets you know what parts should be attached to the robot next. The problem is that assembling the robot from a predetermined parts list isn't all that much fun. Simply manipulating the parts on a CRT is rather like watching Dad build your model airplane. Without the tactile feel, it's a detached experience. It would have been much more fun to have been able to design your own robot from a pool of parts. Perhaps the designers didn't have room for both such an elaborate construction set and the "Doom" portion of the game. As it is, they wound up shortchanging both portions. I can't imagine many kids returning to the construction set after building and saving all three robots once.

A Kinder, Gentler "Doom"

Once the robot is constructed and moved to the castle, game play is Doom without the violence. The robot is armed with a gun just like in Doom, and, again just like in Doom, better guns can be found deeper in the maze. The difference is that the guns don't harm your enemies. They simply freeze them in place. The better the gun, the longer the enemies remain frozen. Also, just like in Doom, the various power-ups, spells, ammunition, fuel, and keys that you need are scattered throughout the maze and can be picked up simply by moving over them. There are three possible levels of play in the castle, and, again just as in Doom , the harder the level, the more enemies you face. An apparent bug in the game is the spell inventory. The robot's console can display only a limited number of spells, so there is a button to scroll the inventory list. However, the scroll button doesn't work. So if the spell you need isn't displayed when you need it, you either have to use or drop the displayed spells at that time, and, whether the designers intended it or not, spells are lost forever when dropped. I got trapped with nowhere to go in the lowest level of the castle, because I inadvertently dropped an "open" spell when searching for another one. Graphics in the castle maze are a mixed bag. Especially on the first level, the corridor graphics are so plain that they look like a throwback to CGA days. The rooms, especially on the lower levels, on the other hand, are much better. Nothing in these graphics compares with anything in Quake or Duke Nukem 3D, but they are effective. And there are some interesting surprises thrown in. For example, one guard, appropriately named Big Foot, will literally kick your robot head over heels in a nicely animated sequence, scattering your robot's parts as you tumble. And you may want to hold off casting the antidote to Evilla's drown spell just to watch the castle fill up with water. It's especially fun to watch the part-stealing bugs swimming around on the water's surface. Other graphic niceties include an excellent auto-map, a revolving robot status screen that shows what parts are missing, and a top-down third person view that's very useful for locating missing parts. Roboquest also includes a full-screen view option. However, even on my Pentium 120 the full screen view slowed the frame rate down to a crawl. On anything short of a Pentium 166, the full screen will probably be unusable.

Wishing for One or the Other

The "Doom" portion of Roboquest is fun, and it should have been just the ticket for parents looking for a first person shooter that they can feel comfortable with their kids playing (or that they can play in front of the kids). Unfortunately, just like the construction set, it's too limited. There are only five floors in the castle maze and only three difficulty levels. Without a facility for designing your own levels or for randomly generated mazes, there just isn't enough for extended game play. Older kids especially will probably find themselves through with Roboquest inside a week. It's too bad, because there is real potential here for either a fun robot construction game or a fun, non-violent Doom-type game. It just needed to be one or the other.

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