Str: Monster Tech Arena [by Vengeful Pastry]

Game Review:  Monster Tech Arena
Release: January 30, 2005
Genre: Action/Strategy
Developer: Vengeful Pastry
System Requirements: Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP, DirectX 8.1+, 96 MB RAM
Players: 1-2 (multiplayer through LAN)
Price: $19.95
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What will mankind do once they realize that war and destruction is not the answer? Right. They’ll bring back gladiator fighting to the public eye to keep the people’s destructive instincts entertained! Of course, after realizing that pain and suffering is not a good idea in general, not humans, but robots will compete against each other at the end of the 21st century, in an event called Monster Tech Arena.

The indie developer Vengeful Pastry brought us this game, which looks very promising at first glance. You can choose from sixteen robot warrior types, then choose from a selection of heads, then you outfit your robot with weapons from a countless array ranging from machine cannons to acid throwers and more. The dueling rules are simple: It’s either you or him, two bots will duke it out until either one is destroyed or the judges declare a winner.

There are various additional game modes, such as a pool billiards variant, a tag team sumo wrestling competition where you have to push the other bots out of the ring, or a very chaotic capture the flag mode.

A fun idea and the the plethora of options and modes of play should add up to make a great game, but right you find yourself confronted with very poor graphics and utterly revolting sound effects that wouldn’t even have been satisfactory two decades ago.

The user interface has countless bugs and design flaws. Buttons that were there before are suddenly no longer visible or become inexplicably disabled. Available, enabled and disabled buttons are indistinguishable. There is an on-line help screen and a tutorial explaining the basic concepts of the game, but both cease to function properly after a few screens. At times the game will cease to display text. There is no setup or options dialog. What baffled me the most was that the cursor keys are hardwired to change the mouse sensitivity in-game, which is utterly pointless, because the game is controlled using a mouse cursor at all times – you will not get any degree of extra precision or control by changing the mouse sensitivity. I don’t understand the purpose of mapping the most important keys on your keyboard (from a gaming perspective) to a completely useless function. The function keys, which allow you to enable or disable some components on your gladiator robot during battles do seem to work well.

The battles themselves take place on ugly landscapes and basically end up threefold: You may face a robot that just runs into yours and keeps shooting/ramming/whatever it is it does, - - it’s hard to recognize at pixel level - until one of the contestants is destroyed. Your opponent might try to remain off-screen and pummel you with rockets and other high-end ordnance that your side won’t be able to purchase for a long time. As soon as you move to the sides of the arena, though, these bots will get confused and become easy prey. Finally, there are the bots that will constantly circle you and fire lasers or other weapons at you, so no matter how threatening you are at short or medium distance, you just don’t stand much of a chance.

The special game modes are fun, but end up being very predictable. Billiards, for example, is all about having a fast robot, as is Capture the Flag.

Multiplayer support is rudimentary, the game will force you to use whichever IP address it finds first – for my desktop computer, that meant only LAN games, and on my Laptop, it meant only internet games. Joy! The netcode is poor, in fact, even the single player game has some “lag”-like effects.

Graphics: 4
Some of the enemy bots, such as the Mach 2, look better than the others, but no matter what you do to customize your own robot – it hard to make it look good. You can choose tacky paint jobs or adjust the colours, but you can’t do much with the simple models. The more interesting bots like the snake chassis have animations which don’t look sensible. The sprites, explosions and landscapes are disappointing.

Sound: 3
There is no music. Most of what you hear is background noise and one sound effect being played over and over again. Often, the sounds have loud clicks in them, which makes it painful (and potentially harmful) to play the game with headphones.

Game Play: 4
Because there are so many different robots and game modes available, the game play is entertaining for a while, but the awkward controls and the weird rules ruin the fun fairly quickly. The weapons seem to be a dime a dozen for your enemies, while you will barely be able to afford more than two tiny guns for your initial gladiator bot. You get promoted to a higher class whether you stood a chance in your last battle or not – inevitably, the game becomes too hard to play and you have to start over again.

Value: 4
The idea is good, but it is poorly developed. I cannot recommend purchasing the game. There aren’t many similar games available though, and Monster Tech Arena does offer more bots than the others.

Concept: 4
The general idea is great, but has been around for a long time, not to say since the Roman Empire! There are some older robot gladiator games available – they might not offer so many different bots to compete with, but they usually did the job of “being a playable and enjoyable game” a lot better than Monster Tech Arena.

Fun: 5
The game is frustrating to play because of the confusing interface (can you even uninstall a weapon you don’t want anymore?) and the battles that last minutes even if they’re decided in the first few seconds when you see what kind of enemy you are facing and find out whether you can do more damage to him than he does to you.

Overall: 4
Monster Tech Arena is very poor. There is a tech support forum, there are online updates, and the developers are still working on the balancing and bug fixes. That doesn’t change the fact that it needs more love before it can qualify as truly entertaining, especially in the sound department, and then in the graphics and user interface areas. Monster Tech Arena also misses out on the educational benefits that you find in similar games such as RobotWar3D, Ceebot or Robot Battle because the game lacks a customizable AI and forces the user to manually control the robot throughout the battle.

Added: March 19th 2005
Reviewer: Moritz Voss
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