by Matt Lau

Created on: July 07, 2008   Last Updated: October 31, 2010

Martians vs Robots

2/5

This is a shoot-'em-up space game reminiscent of old-school Asteroids. The graphics are much more advanced than the 70's Atari classic, the starting Martian saucer is much sleeker and actually banks when it turns*, and the sound effects are much cooler. But, ultimately, the game is about flying around on a screen and shooting floating pieces of rock.

The flying interface is easy to use, which is fortunate since I couldn't find any sort of instructions page. Your mouse cursor appears as a set of cross-hairs on the screen, and by moving your firing cross-hairs around, your ship will bank in that direction. I learned that "W" is thrust and "S" is stop thrust. To fire you click the mouse button (after about the third screen I figured out that holding down the mouse button will auto-fire your ship's guns). The auto-fire feature is important to mention because these rocks are much more vigorous than your standard variety Asteroids rocks. These rocks you need to shoot about 20 or 30 times before they blow up.

So the entire point of the first couple screens is finding a small rock that's not moving too fast, match velocity with it, then blast it with twenty or thirty laser blasts. You should have enough time to do this once, possibly twice if you're a faster learner than me, before time runs out and you advance to the next screen.

In the second round there are floating pieces of rock with some kind of tracking device on them so that they can follow you. In the third round, in addition to the floating rocks that follow you, I found another space ship! (I blew it up). In the fourth or fifth round there was this giant... well I don't want to spoil it for you.

Martians vs Robots is a simple game, and while the sound and graphics quality are a step above most of the free flash games that can be found online, it's not particularly entertaining. Would I recommend the $20 version? Never in a million years.

Martians vs Robots earns a 2 out of 5.

* Ironically, this makes it slightly less realistic from a physics point-of-view than Asteroids was, since ships fighting in a vacuum shouldn't have to bank when turning. As a source I will cite any episode of Babylon 5.

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