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In 2048, fear of terrorist threats and advances in technology pushed security measures to such high levels that every citizen’s actions are tracked by robotic watchmen. The government and megacorporations send army’s of remote-guided robots to ensure surveillance of every nook and cranny of the city and to quell any dissent that may threaten the established order.

These robots are called drones. They vary in size from large robotic tarantulas crawling up walls to spy on conversations to small planes able to carry surgical strikes. They are remote-controlled by people called riggers. These riggers can control multiple drones simultaneously, without being in the line of fire should they come into trouble.

A group of rebels challenge the established order and fight to regain the privacy and freedom of the past. They capture drones and reuse their parts to build their own custom drones. You are one of those rebel riggers.

Mech Warrior meets Pokémon

This cyberpunk game is a cross between Mech Warrior and Pokémon. You assemble teams of custom drones to fight in turn-based battles (the Mech Warrior part). The drones are created using random parts obtained after each battles, which can be traded with friends (the Pokémon part). Let’s look at the combat part first.

You start the game in a poor quarter of a gigantic metropolis, which is under light surveillance by the government. Your goal is to take control of this quarter, then move to another better-defended quarter to take over and so on until you have freed the whole city.

To take control of a quarter, you first fight a number of random battles. Each of those fights give you random drone parts (more details on those later) which allow you to improve the power of your drone squad. When you become powerful enough, you catch the attention of that quarter’s governor. He’s the “boss” of the quarter, a more powerful and skilled enemy — but beating him makes the whole quarter fall under your control.

Each fight is a battle between two riggers and their band of drones. The goal is to either eliminate all of the opposing drones or to eliminate the enemy rigger.

You have to move your drones carefully — there’s a big element of stealth and deception at play. Each drone has a limited sensor range, which depend on the quality of its sensors. It cannot detect enemy drones or riggers outside of that range (similar to fog of war in RTS games). Not all drones are equally easy to detect either: a large drone using lots of energy is easier to spot than a small, energy-efficient drone. Moving stealthily around enemies can bring you more success than simple brute force.

The terrain is also important. Walls provide cover, rubble slows drones down, smoke makes aiming harder and so on. Different drones handle different terrain differently: a rolling drone would go fast on a street but slowly on rubble, one with spider-like legs could crawl on either at normal speed, and a flying drone would just fly over both.

Your rigger is a bit like the king in chess: a weak unit that means defeat if lost. While weak, it has its own useful abilities. Each rigger has a rigging skill level, an intelligence level and a special ability. The rigging skill indicates how many drones he can control at the same time: the higher the skill, the more drones he can have in his band or he can have more complex drones. The intelligence ability give additional information at the beginning of each battle — with high enough intelligence, you can learn what specific drones your opponent is using. Finally, the special ability is similar to the commander’s ability in Advance Wars: a power level accumulates during the fight, when it’s full you can use the power (healing, power boost, etc.)

With a practically infinite number of possible drones, each fight is different. You must always adapt to new conditions, new enemies. That’s what make this game great: no two games are always the same, you can always be surprised by a situation you hadn’t expected.

Building Drones

When you win fights, you gain new random drone parts. Some drone parts are rarer (and more powerful) than others. To get them, you can trade parts with your friends using the DS’ wifi connection.

With all those parts, you can build very different drone squads. The parts have a wide range of abilities — it’s not just slight damage and range differences. You can really come up with creative strategies that suit your play style. For example:

• Timmy is a younger player who just wants to have fun. Instead of making a complicated squad of robots, he makes one really big, bad-ass drone. What it lacks in subtlety, it sure makes up in fire-power.
• Johnny is a more creative player — likes to explore the strategic possibilities of the game. He creates a clever squad of bots: a few small, hard to shoot drones fly around, spotting enemies. When they detect one, they send its coordinates to a slow, mortar-firing drone that stays safely behind cover.
• Spike is a hard-core gamer. Winning is everything for him, so he builds his drone band lean and mean. His drones are stealthy hunt-and-seek machine that avoid enemies while searching for the enemy rigger, which they eliminate ruthlessly and efficiently.

To allow this flexibility, a wide range of different parts must be available. Here’s a short list of possibilities:

• Frames / movement type: large, small, wheel-based, track-based, leg-based, flying and so on. This is the overall structure of the drone and it affects the space available for parts, the maximum weight that can be carries and how easy it is to detect.
• Energy source: a bigger energy source lets you use more power-hungry parts. It also creates more heat, which makes the drone easier to detect.
• Armor: more makes the drone tougher, but increases its weight which slows it down.
• Sensors: Essential to detect enemies.
• Weapons: from melee weapons to full auto machine guns, including sniper rifles and EMP — it’s all there.
• Other stuff: electronic counter-measure to make detection harder, cargo space to carry other drones around, interference-generating parts that freeze enemy drones. There’s a lot of really interesting creative stuff that doesn’t fit neatly into other categories.

The nice thing with the collectible aspect of the game is that even with lots of different parts, that game stays approachable. You start with only a very limited set of drone parts and get the new ones progressively, so you have time to understand them. That’s much better than giving everything at the same time initially and hope the player understands everything at once.

Multiplayer

This game would really shine in multiplayer. Playing against your friends, trying to find the right strategy and the right drone combination to beat your friends would be great fun. It’s similar to the fun of creating new Magic: the Gathering decks, in a sense.

Of course, the Nintendo DS is great for that type of multiplayer. You can play in the same room using the wireless connection or play online using the internet connection. These same channels can be used to trade drone parts.

The Business Case

So, would this game be a commercial hit? I think it has potential. The original Pokémon fans are now grown-up and may be willing to try another trading-based game if it’s more mature. The trading element also increases player involvement with the game, helping to make a community appear around it.

Some may see the turn-based nature of the game as a problem, but I think it could do fine. Plenty of popular games are turn-based — Advance Wars, Final Fantasy, Civilization, etc. — so the genre can definitely still be successful. What’s more, turn-based gaming is great for portable consoles since it can be interrupted so easily. People can play the game in short breaks (on the bus or while waiting for a movie to start at the theater for example) which is a popular way to use the DS.

It’s a pretty distinctive game with a large market (Pokémon sold over 145 million copies!), so I think it has the potential to be a real hit if handled well.

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