Scrap Metal Heroes – Build your robots from scrap to success story in this tower-defense style robot battling game
Rise of the Robots
The rise of the machines is a concept that has been depicted numerous times in literature and on the big screen, and every time it really doesn’t seem to go well for the humans. Now, in the case of I, Robot, the only humans it went badly for were anyone in the film industry connected to the film and Will Smith, in part because it was simply series of million-dollar advertisements for products like Converse (vintage, 2004). Terminator and its successor were actually great films but again, the humans in it didn’t exactly give their life insurance companies anything to relax about due to all the death at the hands of robots. This is exactly why it is a refreshing break from the gloomy side of autonomics to play Scrap Metal Heroes, a highly customisable and purely robot-on-robot battle extravaganza from Sam Raski that is sure to satisfy your craving for making the robots attack their own kind in multiple arenas for fun and for currency to purchase upgrades and improvements to your robot. Think of it as cock fighting minus the cockerels and plus a few thousand robots battling it out during the course of the game.
I Forgot How to Human
The heart of this game is the battling of robots that you are able to construct yourself from a range of around 200 different parts, leading them directly into battle in an arena where you control their production and volume, all with the main purpose of emerging victorious. The game mechanics work a little like a tower defense game since you have to select one of the available robot types from the bottom of the screen and build/deploy it by clicking on the green buttons on the left-hand side of the screen. Each robot you build costs a certain amount of ‘scrap’ each time, the amount of which you have in your possession is indicated at the top with numbers next to a cog-like symbol. Destroying enemy robots rewards you with more scrap as you battle through each level. The main aim is simply to gain 20 points before your base’s health is fully compromised by enemy robots by ensuring that 20 of your robots crosses the enemies’ base line first.
Lord of Creation
Customisation is the true beauty of this game, with the option to swap out heads, body, arms, legs, and internal parts, all with different levels of power and functional benefit to you. Your robot has attributes like hit points, speed, attack power, and range, all determining the effectiveness of your robot during battle. You can also mix things up by using some consumable items like rockets and various types of grenade (acid is my particular favourite at the moment). The different status effects inflicted by things like freeze bombs and acid grenades adds such depth to the battle mechanics that this game becomes more than a shallow tower-defense-like title with each round that passes, and the ability to save up to 15 robot designs means you can keep returning and using your creations as you please.
Still a Better Movie than I, Robot
It is clear that Scrap Metal Heroes is more than your average robot game. You’ve got some action-packed battles that require careful management of scrap resources, consideration of your customisations and robot designs, and a range of missions to play through. Though the initially professional design sometimes reveals itself to be less than polished in places, you cannot fault a game that has so much replay value and whose gameplay is far more accessible than tower defense titles like Robotic Emergence 2. A game that offers as much choice to the player as this falls distinctly above average in the grand scheme of things, putting I, Robot to absolute shame in spite of its low budget and the fact that it isn’t even a movie.
80/100