One Must Fall: Battlegrounds Review - PC

and will team up on you. This gives the enemy characters more personality and helps bring them to life. When the battle begins, you can wander around and let the other robots kill each other off, or you can join in the fight straight away, letting loose your metal-crunching attacks and combos.

The keyboard is used for all control of your robot, such as moving and turning, kicking and punching with all four arms and legs, jumping and picking up items or evading. However, controlling your robot feels a bit sluggish most of the time, especially when trying to move away or face your enemy properly to get in some accurate attacks. Double-tapping the up arrow key causes your robot to run instead of walk, and you can also follow this up with a kick or punch to pull off a special move. By holding down the E key, your robot goes into "evade" mode. This allows you to - instead of simply turn and move - strafe and roll to evade your enemies' attacks. However, the fighting soon becomes repetitive; you'll find yourself simply moving up to your enemies and mashing keys to defeat them.

Graphics

As I mentioned earlier, the robots in One Must Fall: Battlegrounds each look different and are well-designed. Some are big and bulky, like most robots are, while others are thin and agile. Each robot has a nice-looking, reflective, shiny surface to give it a much more metallic look. The textures of the arenas look good also, and while they aren't anything we've seen before, the fact that some surfaces have a subtle metallic shine like the robots' makes them look that little bit better. If it's a cloudy night in the sky above, shadows of the clouds will be cast onto the arena's floor, moving across it constantly. The game also runs at a steady frame-rate even with high graphic settings.

As metal scrapes along metal during the fights, sparks fly off in all directions and explosions rage as the subsequence of special attacks. The special effects and explosions look good, but they're nothing special. The animation of the robots is also quite good, although the feel of the robots is lost most of the time; the robots often move in such an agile way that it looks impossible for their stiff, metallic structures to pull off these moves.

Sound

There isn't much to be heard during fights in One Must Fall: Battlegrounds except the scraping and clangs of metal, explosions and the horrible music. Some of the music tracks in the game don't suit it at all, and it literally sounds like they were pulled from a disco. There isn't any voice acting, so the speech of your enemies in the cutscenes at the beginning of battles is conveyed through subtitles.

Overall

One Must Fall: Battlegrounds is a fun game, but could've been so much more. The idea of bringing fighting into three-dimensional arenas with freedom of movement is excellent, but bigger, multi-floored arenas with more weapon pickups would've added ...