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Game Type: 3D Strategy / Adventure
System Requirements: Windows 9x; P300; 64 Mb RAM; 3d accelerator board with 16 Mb RAM; mouse
Game Homepage: Epsitec
Downloads: Demo [15.5 Megs]
Order Now: Colobot
Gameplay:
 The Earth is being threatened by cataclysm, and your the person to save us all by finding another habitable planet. Of course, all habitable planets you find have some indiginous life that is hostile. While this story can't really be called original, the game behind it is.
The creators of the game call it a real time strategy game, which is a bit overrated by my standards - the amount of units you control isn't really that great, and there is not that much strategy involved - but maybe that gets better at the last few levels. There still are some RTS elements - you'll have to look for resources to build new robots and buildings, power sources to power your buildings and robots, and some advanced robot types (and buildings) can only be built after they've been researched.
Basically, you can choose between a campaign (where you go from planet to planet in your spaceship) or single missions. In every mission (be it a single mission or part of the campaign) you will have specific targets to fullfill, which are a bit too easy in the beginning). The only problem is, your spaceship isn't all that big, and your the only living person in it. Fortunately, you can bring several robots along for the ride and you can control those radiographically (one at a time). Now sometimes you will want to do more things at once (for instance, if there are lots of wasps attacking you and you can't get them all by yourself).
 For that instance, your robots have been equipped with a programmable interface. That's right, a Java/C-like programming language is embedded in the game, and you can program your robots with it. If you follow the campaign, this will actually teach you quite a bit about programming, even if you never did that before (which is why I called it an educational game). This programming of the robots makes it a fun game - sometimes robots need to charge themselves, and you can have them do that automatically. For the people who don't want to do much programming (or are better of adapting other programs), NASA will send you some basic programs over your radio link, which are automatically downloaded into your robots.
Gameplay gets 3.5 out of 5 stars.
Sound:
The sound in the game could really be a lot better. There is a very annoying background music, which is nice the first time you hear it, but I think everyone will turn it off after that. Sound effects are almost non-existant, and quite bland as well (I fire my cannon *pang*). The sound could definately use some more work!
Sound gets 2 out of 5 stars.
Graphics:
The game uses a 3D engine, which makes for nice images. Unfortunately, the textures aren't that good, and the engine makes a lot of clipping errors - "Look! I'm having my leg amputated again!" Then again, the graphics are functional but not beautiful. However, a lot of attention has been spared for effects like water splashes, and those are indeed good.
Graphics gets 3 out of 5 stars.
Overall:
All in all, this game is quite fun if you like to do some programming of your robots and watch the results. Also, it is very good to recommend to an absolute beginner at programming - concepts like variables, etc. get explained very clearly, with lots of examples. This programming interface of the game makes it special.
Overall Game gets 3 out of 5 stars.
ScreenShots: (Click To Enlarge)
  
  
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