Swapper

I never found Robot Wars particularly exciting, even though the idea of robots battling to the death at the whim of their human masters has great potential.

Part of the reason why is that the small machines in the show are meant to be built for ‘war’, but yet they seem to spend half their time breaking down with minimal encouragement.

Instead of pretending its badly constructed android can fight, Swapper takes a dull, yet far more realistic job for an android – rubbish collecting – and makes an entertaining puzzle game out of it instead.

The aim of Swapper is to swap (yeah, well done, you win a point) blocks out of one column and stack them into another before the board is lowered into your little robot’s metal face at the bottom of the screen.

Matching four or more linked colours removes the blocks from the play area and causes a combo meter to start ticking down. Get another match before it expires and the multiplier goes up, and the process begins again with the timer slightly faster than before.

Whereas most games of the column-swapping genre would be fairly happy to leave it at that, Swapper throws in one more element, which is incredibly cheap but strangely absorbing at the same time.

The makers of Swapper’s machine may have had the foresight to include extendable arms to reach faraway coloured rubbish, but they didn’t think of giving him enough power to last more than a couple of minutes in the field.

Every movement your little heartless drone makes, including grabbing piles of rubbish or contemplating emotions, lowers his battery level. Run out of juice and the robot’s speed is severely reduced and his arms are made useless, until he reaches a power pad on the corners of the screen to recharge.

Needless to say, this reduced ability to do his job effectively ends any combos that may have been gathering and feels like a very forced way of making a relatively easy game a lot harder.

However, the ‘cheap’ batteries do also end up giving the game a certain amount of depth that's sorely lacking in Swapper’s peers.

Juggling the demands of matching, speed, and efficiency of movement ends up being very involving, even if the underlying mechanic that facilitates this is about as contrived as a flying R2D2 (it still hurts).

It’s just as well that there's this extra layer of strategy, because the package as a whole is relatively dull.

The locations that your matching takes place in, for instance, vary between dull, grey industrial complexes, and dull orange clay pits.

Along with the boring-looking locations, the Career mode trudges along very slowly, with target scores for each level always set slightly too high hold your interest. Upgrades to your robot take absolutely ages to reach, too.

Despite the fairly rubbish looking parts surrounding it, though, Swapper’s gameplay is engaging and different enough to be worth recommending.