I made a review before this a few days into early access, and if you want a TL;DR I'll paraphrase one of my previous lines - buy into it if you're fine with being an alpha tester. I am. It's flawed, but fun.

So as Robot Arena III rolls into a full release, it must be considered that the devs themselves say that it's more of a tactical move to bring it out of early access, what with the Steam summer sale approaching fast. But I'm not here to knock their sales strategy.

Having a binary recommendation option is tough for some games; this is one of them. To recommend it right this moment as a full release title would be to grossly overrate it's current quality and depth of content. The physics aren't all there as a simulation game, with bad collision physics in certain circumstances and with certain components. Components can still be placed anywhere without any boundaries. The career mode does not reset when all of the tournaments have been finished. There's a bug where the camera won't stop moving up or down in the bot lab after battling some AI opponents that should have been swatted by now.

But to not recommend it would be to downplay the monumental effort the devs have been undertaking in the last 4 weeks to improve the game. The first day of early access the game was considered 'full', and it was a mess. You couldn't even build a wedge shaped robot because every robot had box collisions. Now you can. The biggest drive motors would make your robot flip on the spot like one of those toy backflipping dogs unless it weighed as much as a star. Now they don't. Weight classes are back. Should all of these things been in the game on day 1? Absolutely. But they also could have just dumped the game there and then and moved on. They haven't. I respect that.

They have good ideas. The 5 layer chassis system is great for rounded shapes or crafting detail. Being able to move components after placing them is one of the best quality of life improvements they could have made after RA2. Someone on Gametechmods[www.gametechmods.com] figured out how to mod the game, even if it's crude at the moment, so a modding community is imminent. Robot Arena III will be great. It's just not 'great' this second.

I made a review before this a few days into early access, and if you want a TL;DR I'll paraphrase one of my previous lines - [b]buy into it if you're fine with being an alpha tester.[/b] I am. It's flawed, but fun. So as Robot Arena III rolls into a full release, it must be considered that the devs themselves say that it's more of a tactical move to bring it out of early access, what with the Steam summer sale approaching fast. But I'm not here to knock their sales strategy. Having a binary recommendation option is tough for some games; this is one of them. To recommend it right this moment as a full release title would be to grossly overrate it's current quality and depth of content. The physics aren't all there as a simulation game, with bad collision physics in certain circumstances and with certain components. Components can still be placed anywhere without any boundaries. The career mode does not reset when all of the tournaments have been finished. There's a bug where the camera won't stop moving up or down in the bot lab after battling some AI opponents that should have been swatted by now. But to not recommend it would be to downplay the monumental effort the devs have been undertaking in the last 4 weeks to improve the game. The first day of early access the game was considered 'full', and it was a mess. You couldn't even build a wedge shaped robot because every robot had box collisions. Now you can. The biggest drive motors would make your robot flip on the spot like one of those toy backflipping dogs unless it weighed as much as a star. Now they don't. Weight classes are back. Should all of these things been in the game on day 1? Absolutely. But they also could have just dumped the game there and then and moved on. They haven't. I respect that. They have good ideas. The 5 layer chassis system is great for rounded shapes or crafting detail. Being able to move components after placing them is one of the best quality of life improvements they could have made after RA2. Someone on [url=http://www.gametechmods.com]Gametechmods[/url] figured out how to mod the game, even if it's crude at the moment, so a modding community is imminent. Robot Arena III will be great. It's just not 'great' this second.