lol, NEVERLAX "SDW" ftw
After spending hours on your last bot arena, I am glad to spend much less time on this one, simply because it was more enjoyable. Is this one better than the last one? I don't think anyone can say no. While the last one centered around buying bots and hoping they'd attack intelligently, this one centered around buying bots AND manuevering them around. Could it be improved? Definitely.
1. Allow bots to stay in one place without moving everywhere (very annoying to send a healer away only to have him come right back)
2. When a bot is ordered to "follow" an enemy bot, have it only attack other bots if it is unable to attack the targetted bot (for example it's not fun when I target one bot, but my bot's attacking another one that just happened to get in range first)
3. Still haven't seen that no weight limit mode...
4. Consider a REAL challenge mode (what you had should be called training mode or the like), for instance your bot(s) take part in multiple consecutive battles where your health doesn't recover, or doesn't recover fully
5. Since when did arenas have just two teams? Something that would help make the 4th BotArena "fresh" would to have each arena actually have multiple battles
6. You already have damage and health vary, consider adding speed, accuracy, evasion (hit but not damaged), and agility (ability to turn). You could also consider certain bots (chassises, armors) having special abilities, like auto-heal, damage nearby robots upon death, an aura (boosted stat(s) for nearby friendly robots or continuous damage for nearby enemy robots, etc. Adding this should make it possible to add much more length to the game without making it tedious
7. This could possibly be the most important one, but also one of the hardest to program: Enemy AI. I'm not talking about the bots... their AI, as far as I can see, is fine. I'm talking about your opponent controlling his bots in the same way you are (or at least what appears to be the same way), so that the enemy isn't just running around with their heads cut off. You could even give each team a face (upper body), if you could draw one. Something to force the human to play smarter
Btw... with that bonus weapon (see summary) it's possible to win every single arena with the same bot :P
I look forward to seeing an intelligent enemy in Bot Arena 4 ;)
Graphics: In general, same as #2, with some new bot options
Style: Main difference between 2 and 3 is more bot options and human control during matches... interface still looks about the same though
Sound: Like a reviewer said before me, the sounds did get annoying after a while, but it wasn't that bad
Violence: How do you rate bots fighting? I ignored this
Interactivity: Human control was a definite plus, but control was sometimes slightly clumsy (see first improvement)
Humor: No humor, none needed. Ignored
Overall: Much better than #2, but still has many improvements that could be made
