Game Cover

Beep boop beep

Platform played on: PC

# Review

This is a quirky game about navigating a robot through an obstacle course; it came free along with the notoriously terrible DRM software Games for Windows LIVE.

I've always enjoyed puzzle games, and this one is particularly well-made. The graphics and interfaces are very clean, and as a violin player, I approve of the jazz violin background music. The game was very soothing to play.

Solving a puzzle is very rewarding and I like the par system used for scoring, where there's a limit on the number of steps the robot can take, and the overall score is based both on speed and the number of steps. This mechanic adds an extra dimension of gameplay to the game.

Very Clean Gameplay

There's also a level editor, where one can create their own puzzles; it would've been cool if there was a feature where people can share their creations.

Level Editor

# Conclusion

It's a lighthearted puzzle game with good mechanics; while not particularly revolutionary, it was free and very well-made.

This game is very nostalgic; I remember playing through all 100+ levels of Tinker in middle school. Recently, having started learning about reinforcement learning, I have been thinking about different games on which to test the RL techniques I've been reading about in papers. This game came to mind.

For one, the goal of the game is to navigate a robot towards the end goal on a grid. This is essentially an enhanced version of the classic gridworld, which is an excellent representation of a Markov decision process. This game also has an exploratory aspect, which makes it very interesting to design and train an agent around. With a level editor, one can design their own worlds for training. It could be an interesting project. I'll have to revisit this idea once I've learned more about RL.

# Overall rating: 7.2

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