In this action-adventure powered by Unreal Engine 3, you play as Blitz, a robot whose space station has been attacked by the terrifying megaNOED. To fire up the enormous Space Cannon and defeat the invaders, you must travel to six different non-linear regions of the station (from the armory to the radar station to the cooling towers), each having three levels. Once all of these are completed, a final group will surface.
It would be best to defeat various foes along the road, including arm-twirling annoyance bots, flying wheels of death, and even smiling, spherical minions. There are ground and air-based robots and boss confrontations at the end of each hub. While most adversaries may be shot and destroyed, some must be outwitted using the surroundings and physics-based gameplay (driven by Ageia’s PhysX), such as using barrels to crush enemies or lure them into dangerous regions. You’ll find a friend in the station’s depths who will provide you with many new enhancements. Some can be obtained by collecting green cards known as Upgradium as you go through the stages. Others will be given to you if they are required to complete a section.
You begin with simple rocket launchers and energy weapons, but as you go, you will gain a hover gun, which causes everything it strikes to float up in the air, and a point-to-point gun, which uses an energy beam to tie two items together. There are puzzles scattered throughout the game that must be performed to power up the weapon, some as simple as “push button” types. In contrast, others include swapping the laser routes with prisms to open doors or putting metal objects through a shredder to make a cannon shell. Some problems may have several solutions depending on your creativity.
The Xbox Live game version uses Allegorithmic’s ProFX procedural texturing technique to decrease the game size to a size suitable for the service. RoboHordes, an early game version, was created in 2005 as a tech demo for the Intel dual-core processor as a single-level game with entirely physics-driven gameplay.
