We’ll come back to this when we’ve had a chance to watch it later, but the first episode of SyFy’s Robot Combat League is online and currently viewable from the UK.
Go have a look! It’s basically massive humanoid robots beating the hell out of each other.
First of all: I want a go.
The build-up was properly exciting, the show’s well put together, and the storytelling had me sympathising with the “featured” contestants (not a bad job since there were so many people and things to introduce so quickly – presumably there’ll be more of that, and more fights, next show).
And then it all fell apart in the actual fight, which is basically “who can throw a lucky punch at a thing someone else designed”.
The beauty of Robot Wars was the multiple designs, the different approaches, and the sheer speed and skill with which the best operators could handle their robots. Here? It’s all style and no substance, and every fight – even when they start to introduce weaponry – looks like it’ll pretty much be a crapshoot. Which is a shame, really, ‘cos the rest of it’s pretty solid.
Whereas! I thought it was the opposite, fairly tedious reality tropes bolted on to a fight which felt pretty exciting to watch. I loved it with the bloke throwing a punch was inset, because when the robot connected I really sort of felt it.
I got bored of Robot Wars because Hypnodisc always won or fights were stopped because someone got pushed into the pit or flipped over. We wanted carnage and we never really got it but that doesn’t look like being an issue here.
I’m interested to see how episodes play out, I don’t know how many are in the run, but if we’re looking at a single elimination each week that’s going to really hurt, people are going to watch for the fights in the main.
For an opening episode to introduce the concept, meet the 12 teams, decide what order they’ll fight in and have the first proper match, it was a good sample of things to come. I’m also hoping that now the introductions are out of the way, they’ll have more than just one match per episode as that is the main attraction of the show. They did show the tournament bracket a couple of times during the episode, and it looks like there might be a playoff with the 6 losers to decide who will make up the 4th quarter-final match as the first-round matches will produce 6 winners. Overall, it seems there’ll be 6 first round fights, 4 quarter-finals, 2 semi-finals, then the final itself, so only 13 fights in the whole series, not including the possible playoff fights. But I digress, a whole hour for just one 6-minute fight if it goes the distance is going to have to pull something good out of the bag to keep people hooked. OK, so one of the contestants is an MMA fighter and George Lucas’ daughter, we don’t really care about that, we want to see some robot carnage!
As for the fighting itself, I felt it was more to do with luck than skill, as all the fight seemed to boil down to was the people controlling the arms flailing about a bit and hoping they hit the actuators to cripple a limb, although it WAS satisfying to see the sparks flying and hydraulic fluid gushing out whenever a solid hit was thrown. Also, I agree with Tom, I’d LOVE a go as well! I suddenly feel like watching Real Steel for some reason too…
I’m not sure of the episode order- If they plan on having 2 fights in most of the episodes that would be 8 eps:
ep 1- Ranking and FR1
ep 2- FR2 and FR3
ep 3- FR4 and FR5
ep 4- FR6 and losers challenge for last 2 QF spots
ep 5- QF1 and QF2
ep 6- QF3 and QF4
ep 7- SF1 and SF2
ep 8- Championship
there are other combinations too- they could do one fight a week for just the first round, then the loser’s challenge in week 7, quarterfinals in weeks 8 and 9, semifinals in week 10, and finals in week 11.
So anywhere from 8-13 episodes is feasible pretty much.
ok, well i watched it, its very much my sort of thing. im very impressed by the show. i thought the show would be pretty one dimensional with just fights, but with the ‘reality’ edge etc, it actually kept me hooked.
and i’m with brig, the fight looked so epic. i’m not entirely sold as to whether its fair or not, true, it seems lucky punches can do the trick, but a) in theory its the same with real boxing, b) it means any fight is still worth fighting right to the last and c) i dont even care, it was just too insane
It looked like the bottom of the bracket had only 4 teams. 8 teams will battle in the top half of the bracket resulting in one finalist, and the remaining 4 will produce a 2nd finalist. I could not rewind it watching through to see who is in the bottom 4, the easier side, as I see it.