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Steambot Chronicles: Battle Tournament
Score: 73%
ESRB: Everyone 10+
Publisher: Atlus
Developer: Irem Software Engineering
Media: UMD/1
Players: 1 - 4
Genre: Action/ Fighting/ RPG

Graphics & Sound:
Steambot Chronicles: Battle Tournament is one of those games without much precedent or fanfare that manages to look as good or better than some more highly touted products. Much of this starts with good design. Watching giant robots battle is endlessly entertaining, and Steambot Chronicles has lots of robots in a variety of shapes and sizes. Building a bot involves lots of choices, with customization that goes right down to the level of color choice and designing your own emblem. Seeing instant changes in your robot makes for a good payoff and creates incentive for exploring and earning new parts.

The environment is a mix of city and country settings, where you'll encounter new and different opponents, bent on the destruction of your precious 'bot. The arena simulates battle in these environments, and gives you the feeling that you're out in front of a huge crowd. There are good voices throughout the game, added mostly for flavor but very well done. The amount of reading required is moderate, enough to tell the story of each person in town or the other areas you'll explore, but never so much that you get bored. Where you have dialogue choices with characters, you'll be given chances to respond across a wide range of emotion, including some very suggestive talk with your mechanic, Venus. If you are playing as a girl, this may come off a bit strange, but the game doesn't exact great penalties for choosing the wrong dialogue.


Gameplay:
Categorizing Steambot Chronicles: Battle Tournament is a bit difficult. On some level, it plays out like a traditional RPG, with character development and story and NPCs. On another, you'll find this feels more like a job simulation, with lots of quests that fall more into the category of mundane tasks. Finally, you'll get plenty of robot battling, controlled in a style that is sufficiently heavy on action to make for at least an Action/RPG label. That is probably the easiest way to file the game, since the job-sim stuff still fits well within the purview of most RPGs, as fodder for questing. Building experience and wealth is a must in Steambot Chronicles. You are cast as either a boy or girl new to town, that must prove his or her worth in the arena. Opponents will crush you unless you can gather the best new equipment and customize your 'bot in the shop. Lucky that you develop a good relationship early on with Venus and can load up on gear, provided you have enough cash on hand.

Gathering that cash is the meat of Steambot Chronicles: Battle Tournament. If you enjoy slow, steady gameplay that rewards patient players, you'll find much to like here. The repetition was frankly a bit... repetitious, for us. We wished for more variety in both the quest choices and the arena gameplay. Taking on quests or missions is all wrapped around the local employment office, where a lovely lady with a sultry voice will tell you about those in town in need of a hired hand. Mundane tasks like delivering a newspaper take on extra excitement when you have to fight your way through aggressive 'bots along the path to your destination. This is the best part of the game, but there aren't enough new areas or new enemies or new jobs to keep things fresh. Delivering your 10th paper to the same area and fighting the same 'bots just isn't thrilling. You will find that upgrades make the going easier, as you spend your hard-earned cash on new robot parts like arms, legs, frames, and accessories. The decision to upgrade versus buying new parts is a bit meaningless - you'll always need the best parts and you'll always have to upgrade them to defeat the strongest enemies in the arena. Multiplayer is fun enough, provided you have a friend with a copy of the game that enjoys the arena gameplay. Various locations simulated in the arena offer variety, and you will enjoy seeing your friends' customizations to their 'bots, but the actual controls allow too much fudging and button-mashing. A true online component might have taken multiplayer in Steambot Chronicles to another level.


Difficulty:
There can be a lot of frustration during battles as a result of poorly implemented controls, both by way of sensitivity and layout. The layout becomes awkward as you try to unleash more complicated maneuvers, which you need to master if you hope to defeat stronger enemies. The accrual of cash isn't complicated as much as it is boring, so the difficulty here is maintaining your focus on the task at hand when things become mundane. Nobody will find the arena battles very enjoyable; they are over too quickly and the enemies are overpowered from almost the very beginning. You'll learn to mash your way to victory, but this makes the win feel cheap and undeserved. In the case of your defeat, you'll feel constantly ripped off because of how limited your powers seem compared to those of your opponents. For multiplayer duels, the balance is obviously improved. Lots of reading (both dialogue and map) makes Steambot Chronicles: Battle Tournament largely inaccessible to younger gamers, which is sad considering they'd be the most likely to put in the time and complete the often repetitive tasks.

Game Mechanics:
What we mean by awkward controls is that certain attacks are mapped to buttons in a way that requires you to cover two buttons at a time with a thumb or stretch two fingers. This is something you'd almost expect in a fighting game, but not in a milder Action/RPG like this. We also noticed issues that felt programmed in, such as the delay after your 'bot pulls a "rush attack" by launching headlong into an enemy. These attacks work selectively on enemies, making it all the more confusing as you try to build a battle strategy. Very little on controls or attack strategy is documented anywhere in the game, and all this combines to make the Battle Arena portion of Steambot Chronicles the least satisfying. This is a shame, because the economics of the game are rigged in such a way that arena battling brings maximum cash. Fighting 'bots during your jobs can generate money and other items, but there's not enough payoff in excitement or variety to make this worthwhile. An alternate control scheme may ease the pain for some players, but a more scaled-down, simplified approach, coupled with better directions, would have been a great improvement.

Steambot Chronicles: Battle Tournament comes out of the robot-game factory feeling a bit underdone, but possessing good raw materials. More true RPG story development or battle variety would have made all the difference in the world. Without much depth, we found both the "chronicles" and the "arena" portion unexciting, and all the flashy robot parts in the world won't make up for that. Kudos to the team that put time into some excellent front-end design and into directing the voice talent, but we all know by now that a good cover doesn't guarantee the book will be a good read.


-Fridtjof, GameVortex Communications
AKA Matt Paddock

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