CogniToy better be careful. With Mindrover, they just may give "educational software" a good name. Before you bolt for the exits, hear me out: Mindrover isn't like other games that are supposed to make learning fun and usually come packaged in brightly colored boxes covered with Sesame Street characters and sprinkled with the letters "ABC". No, Mindrover is a surprisingly complex game that makes an appeal to your engineering and creative side.
The objective of the game is to build a vehicle that can win competitions. "Winning" is a pretty open-ended concept. It can mean placing first in a race, tagging an opponent, traversing checkpoints in the correct order, or accomplishing some other goal. One thing is certain: once the race begins, your vehicle is on its own. All you can do is watch and pray that you did a decent job designing it.
The building phase is where players will spend most of their time. After first selecting a chassis (treaded, hovercraft, and wheeled, each available in several sizes), you will then select which components you want to add to your vehicle. There are several component categories, including "Navigation", "Weapons" and "Sensors". Of course, there are weight/space/cost constraints to consider, so you must choose wisely when tailoring your vehicle to win a particular scenario.
And if only it was that easy. Once you get the components, you will need to wire them together. For example, you can connect a proximity sensor to a steering wheel and trigger the wheel to turn left 15o when the edge of the track is near. Or you can outfit your vehicle with machine guns and have them fire when an enemy is picked up in the radar. Along with wiring the components together, you can add logic to the signals. This means you can set up circuits that use AND, OR, and NOT. Other logical operations (as well as more components) can be downloaded for free at
www.mindrover.com.
Wiring would be a nightmare if it wasn't for the clean interface. Adding a wire is as easy as clicking on one component and dragging to another. Each wire has a properties sidebar that can be easily read. This is where you determine how the wires function. Usually there are a couple selection boxes, such as one for the source component's operations and one for the destination component. You select which source action will trigger a destination action. Players can also choose different colors for the wires which can make complicated circuits much more coherent. Additionally, you can zoom in and zoom out, as well as scroll the view and drag components around.
My descriptions have really only scratched the surface of this deep game. Upon picking up the 252 page manual (which sadly also serves as the CD holder. No jewel case here.), it is immediately apparent that this is a game that takes time to learn. Thankfully, there are some excellent Tutorial scenarios that do a fine job of teaching you the basic operations, such as staying on the track, tracking an enemy, and following way points. Much of the Tutorial is also documented in the manual, along with the various components for the vehicles.
Scenarios are broken down into categories, such as Sports, Battles, and Miscellaneous. You can pick and choose which levels you want to play, a feature I really appreciated in this type of game. It would have made no sense to force the player to play through the game linearly (this is one of the problems with the otherwise excellent Rollercoaster Tycoon). The levels are consistently original. One track is modeled after a drag race. You must place first, but there's one catch: a deadly electric wire is positioned a couple meters past the finish line and if you hit it you lose. Another track is inspired by sumo-wrestling where the objective is to knock your opponent out of a ring.
Mindrover has a steep learning curve, there is no doubt about it. The first couple times you throw aside the manual and try to design a vehicle by yourself, you will probably have some frustrating moments. But the satisfaction of winning is usually worth it. I say "usually" because some of the scenarios just didn't strike me as fun, but that's OK. There are so many different types of levels here that everyone is bound to have a few favorites and a few not-so-favorites.
The graphics in Mindrover are good. Icons for the components are clear and easy to distinguish. The levels themselves are fully 3D. The camera can automatically chase your vehicle during a race, or you can move it around freely (although this may cause some clipping problems if you try do strange stuff). I really liked how the 3D model of your vehicle actually shows all the components that you used. Components are also visible on enemy vehicles, and sometimes this is a good way for you to get a hint about how to build your own.
There is one stability issue about Mindrover that bothered me. Whenever I would quit the game, I would get an error when returning back to Windows98. Also, some of the icons on my desktop would disappear, forcing me to reboot if I wanted to see them again. This happened after every session and became tiring. Other than that, I didn't experience any major bugs.
How much you enjoy Mindrover is largely based on how much patience you have. If you enjoy programming and logic problems, you will probably like this game a lot. As a programmer myself, I did like much of what this title offered. This isn't a game that can be played for 10-minutes during your break at the office. It is designed for people who are willing to spend time learning and playing it. If that sounds like you, then Mindrover is probably right up your alley.
