BattleBots: Design & Destroy (GBA)

After a chance Youtube recommendation put a BattleBots fight in front of me a while back, I decided to go and look at how the series had been doing since I last checked in… and ended up watching every robot fight of the latest season. After watching the remote controlled robots tear each other apart, I got the idea to go see what kind of BattleBots games there are I could play, and I came across a rather curious situation where there are seemingly two BattleBots games but they are actually just the same game with a few minor tweaks. BattleBots: Beyond the Battlebox released first for the Game Boy Advance, but not even a year later it was rereleased with the name BattleBots: Design & Destroy, the main difference being that the game cut back the capabilities of the game cartridge. While there were some bug fixes between the two versions of the same game, the ability to save was entirely removed and replaced with a password system, so while Beyond the Battlebox is likely the more convenient version to play, Design & Destroy seems to basically play the same.

The BattleBots television series is a robot combat show that’s appeared across a few networks across the years. Rather than starring human-shaped machines battling it out like in a cartoon, BattleBots are real machines grounded in the rules of physics and design, meaning many of them are somewhat small boxy creations that rely on special tools to tear into each other. Thankfully, despite being limited in design by what is technologically feasible, these robots can put on some spectacular shows thanks to the creativity the designers bring to the table. Weapons can include thing like large spinning saws and discs for shearing off metal, hammers that shake up the internal wiring of their targets, and spinning drums that grind up whatever they touch. Less damage focused designs exist as well for quick eliminations such as flippers that can turn rival robots onto their heads where they can become immobile, some focus on clamping down on an enemy and moving them towards the hazards built into the Battlebox, and a few aren’t much more than a full body spinner where anything that touches their quickly rotating body will lead to instant damage. These weapon options all make an appearance in BattleBots: Design & Destroy as do a few less typical choices such as drills and even a rotating mace, but despite a decent amount of weapon variety, their effectiveness is never guaranteed.

In a typical BattleBots bout you have 3 minutes to pit whatever bot you’ve built against the opponent’s creation, victory achieved either when they’ve been damaged to the point they can no longer move or they’ve otherwise been incapacitated in a way that prevents movement such as being flipped upside down. If you have simulation difficulty on flips can be dangerous, but switch to arcade settings and all flipping tactics become invalidated as now any bot, regardless of its design, can get back up, so one of the game’s settings can completely remove the danger of a certain subset of bots. If neither side has been eliminated through any available means though, the victor of the match will be determined by the judge’s decision, the game rewarding points based on damage, aggression, and strategy. Damage is displayed as an easily understood meter during the fight and bots smoke and burn to show how poorly they’re doing, but what the game considers aggression and strategy is hard to understand. Aggression seems straightforward, but ramming into your opponent every chance you get somehow can count as very little aggression, seemingly based on a poor attempt to determine who initiated contact. We can’t see into how the game judges strategy but presumably it bases its score on how you attack or utilize arena hazards, but one side often has 1 or 2 strategy points so it seems to be a score given to the player who was a clear winner anyway. However, don’t be surprised if a battle comes down to a single point even after one side seemingly did more damage or controlled the pace of the battle more as the game fails to parse its more abstract metrics in a reasonable manner.

The other weapon types besides the flipper don’t always get off much better. The body saw that rings around full body spinner robots seems to do next to no damage, hammers seem to deal their damage if they hit close enough to a robot and will even deal that damage between hammer swings if you just keep smashing away with them relentlessly, and even seemingly reliable weapons like the vertical saw can sometimes do far less than you’d expect from one of the sport’s best weapon types. There is a lot more at play than simple weapon selection, but considering the weird detection issues on arena hazards like the automated Pulverizer hammers though, it’s clear even the most important feature of the robot fights isn’t quite coded well to reliably hold up its part of the action. Arena hazards can be a helpful addition to the fight though, mainly in the regular Battlebox where there are some boxed in corners where it’s easy to trap an AI opponent for constant free damage until they pass through your robot’s model to escape. The Airplane Graveyard arena instead has a giant crusher the AI throws itself into a lot, but the benefit of that comes with the detriment of a persistent magnet that tries to drag you in and thus makes hazard avoidance sometimes more important than fighting the other robot. The Volcano and Oil Rig stages have less obstructive hazards while still having cute ideas like lava spouts and dropping off the side that seem like they’d do more damage than they actually do, but these already fanciful location variations would lead to constant immediate elimination if they were treated realistically. You always get to pick the arena for single-player matches, so you can choose whether you want a fair fight or if you want to abuse these location’s quirks at least.

While there’s more to say about the issues with destroying bots, it should be noted the designing portion had potential. There are four weight classes you can participate in, the tournament mode having you progress from Lightweight to Middleweight to Heavyweight to Super Heavyweight while making a new machine for each small set of battles. There are two considerations to be had while designing a robot from a resource perspective, the player needing to make sure they have the cash to put the robot together and then needing to make sure the robot doesn’t go over the weight class’s restrictions. Starting out your cash is not a problem, but as you get deeper in you’ll need to repair your robot between fights and replacing parts or upgrading them can start to drain your funds. After winning a match though you can get a sponsorship where a specific part is given to you for free, but for the most part weight and cost will be what decides how powerful your robot will be. For example, you can load a bunch of weapons onto a machine, but then it will likely have to compensate with weaker armor or less capable engines to offset the costs.

Making the machine within these limitations is fine enough conceptually and can be a bit of fun before certain problems rear their head. First, the chassis you pick for your robot is locked in for the entirety of that weight class despite the player being able to remove every other piece, and this can be a problem if it’s too weight or oddly shaped. Since there’s no manual save you’d have to wipe out your progress and reset if you pick a chassis that just isn’t going to work out, but this also relates to the fact that you can’t really test builds besides throwing them into the fire. You might stumble across an incredibly powerful weapon like the chainsaw and never have to worry about success again, or you might have built a robot that can only use weapons that break easily or deal very little damage even when working properly. Unclear hit detection and damage allocation can make it hard to read who came out on top in a weapon on weapon collision with an enemy robot as well, and you’ll only be able to learn where your bot is taking the most damage after the fight on the repair screen since otherwise the visuals for damage are always the same. In fact, the effect for damaging another bot being universal means you sometimes can’t tell if an attack is working at all since some bots like spinners always have a weapon active and that could be the source of the sparks instead of whatever is hitting them.

If you don’t luck into picking one of the robot types that can easily shred up the competition, BattleBots: Design and Destroy can be an incredibly frustrating experience of bad hit detection and unclear systems, so it’s either going to be too easy to be invested in or you’ll struggle to make something work when there’s no clear answer on what the issues might be save through rigorous testing you can’t afford to do. This also plays into aspects like the battery and motor where the lack of visual feedback or clear outcomes based on variations in these pieces makes it hard to know how much you’re benefiting from swapping these out. Something that already requires a bit more technical knowledge to understand with the real life BattleBots becomes practically irrelevant here as you’re just guessing how good these pieces are based on price, weight, and name.

While you’re using your own creations to fight here in BattleBots: Design & Destroy, the opposition is made up entirely of real life robots, some who use parts and designs impossible within the creator to remain faithful to their recognizable appearances. You are able to play as all 16 of these for the Brawl Mode as well as any creations you have from single player or any you enter via a unique password assigned to each created bot. You still need to keep the fights within the specific weight classes, but you can have up to four robots fighting at once where special power ups can be picked up such as one to heal your robot up. Some recognizable real world robots include the full body spinner Ziggo, the cat themed Mouser Mecha-Catbot, Diesector with its front clamps and side hammers, and the lifting arm focused BioHazard. While some big names like Nightmare didn’t make the cut, Sunshine Lollibot includes a giant vertical spinner to compensate for its absence and the robots picked are at least fairly varied even if it means some of them end up boring or overpowered based on how the game’s systems favor their design.

One issue that takes its toll more in Brawl Mode though is the fact the screen really can’t display all of the arena at one time, a problem exacerbated by having up to four fighters but just as troublesome in the tournament’s one on one fights. You are given a radar to know where the enemy is at all times, but you won’t know if they’re facing you and ready to fight or trying to avoid you, and with the view of the fight so zoomed in there will be a lot of blindly charging in and hoping you have the split second to avoid aggression if necessary. The constant lack of info on what your opponents might be doing when they’re out of sight just further lessens your chance for strategizing as it is far too easy to lose track of the most important variables in the match. Staying close isn’t the best tactic in an even fight or one you’re losing either, so running off can be the right choice even if it suddenly introduces more trouble to trying to even play a round of simple bot fighting action.

THE VERDICT: With its technical issues and the problems with its unclear systems, BattleBots: Design & Destroy comes out looking rougher than a BattleBot that just lost a fight. While the design system seems fine on the surface, whether or not certain weapons work and how certain design choices impact your robot seems impossible to determine without a lot of costly experimentation and being creative is less likely to pay off than bumbling your way into one of the overpowered weapon options. Playing as some of the real world BattleBots is even weakened by how the gameplay mechanics lessen their effectiveness, and couple that with aspects like the inability to even see what the other robot is up to when they’re off-screen and you can’t really enjoy this as a mindless robot brawler or a strategic design challenge.

And so, I give BattleBots: Design & Destroy for Game Boy Advance…

A TERRIBLE rating. The customization system that seems like the best aspect of BattleBots: Design & Destroy just isn’t given the features it needs to support this title even if there weren’t numerous issues with how damage is determined, how fights are judged, or whether or not things even work in the first place. Having weapons vary in effectiveness isn’t a bad idea, but the winning strategies do seem to be picking the most powerful options and steamrolling all opposition regardless of their tactics or how their other systems have been designed. Giving the player the means to test the weapons freely might make it too easy to find the overpowered options, but entering battle with one that barely does anything is far worse than picking the tool that will make the game far too easy. The game certainly needs to explain the variation between options like batteries and motors at least, but it’s likely it will have to make those matter more first since the game is based too much around landing heavy hits with a strong weapon. Your foe becoming but a blip on a radar after moving a few feet away makes it hard to be tactical beyond exploiting arena hazards ripe for cheap play. There aren’t many close fights to be had unless both sides spend more time running than battling, and in that case it’s boring to participate since no meaningful interactions are occurring.

There are rare moments where things line up by chance, where both sides have similarly effective weapons and actually need to respect each other’s capabilities, but most fights are filled with glitchy exchanges, one-sided beatdowns, or unclear outcomes to how the robots interacted. It’s a shame BattleBots fans have to squeeze the few bright spots out of this mess if they want to see their brand represented in video game form, and considering this is the supposedly improved rerelease it must mean they had it even worse before BattleBots: Design & Destroy fixed some bugs. There are thankfully other robot fighting games out there that are rooted in the same realism as BattleBots, but the ones based directly on the show seem in rather rough shape.