Combat Creatures Attacknids review

The Attacknids pretty much sells itself. After all, who wouldn't want a spider-robot that fires rubber discs? It looks so cool that we'll even forgive the fact that its play-on-words name is technically incorrect, as arachnids all have eight legs, rather than the six on the Attacknid.

Ignoring entomological correctness, the Attacknids is a stupendous amount of fun and brilliantly easy to control thanks to the simple joypad. Using the direction keys you rotate the Attacknid's head (its 'Battle Brain') the way you want it to point, and push forwards or backwards to move in that direction. It then menacingly marches in that direction in a terrifying unstoppable robot way.

The simple controls make it easy for you to attack what you want

On top of that you've got controls to move its weapon up and down and a button to fire. Attacknids ships with the Dissector Disc (which first rubber discs), although the Combat Creatures website shows that you can also buy the Snyper Dart and Destroyer Spheres upgrades instead.

This is one menacing-looking robot

By itself, it's an amazing amount of fun walking the Attacknids around and taking pot shots and people and objects in your hours. The discs fly for a good 10m or so, although they can curve unpredictably at times.

However, Attacknids is more about the combat experience and comes into its own when you've got two of them. When fighting robot against robot, the goal is simple: disable your opponent's Attacknid by hitting the target on the front of the Battle Brain three times.

There's a choice of two target sizes (small and large) to make it harder or easier to win. Attackids also come with Combat Armour, which is attaches to the legs and springs off when hit by a direct hit. So, as well as disabling your opponent, you can slowly pick them apart, too.

What could be more fun than shooting another robot?

Attacknids is great fun, but we found that the discs have to be carefully loaded so that they're completely flat, otherwise the firing mechanism gets jammed. At £70 per robot, it's not an impulse buy either, particularly if you need to get two for combat. Still, if you can live with the price, Attacknids is refreshingly different, menacing and excellent fun.