Robot Commando by Ian Livingstone Steve Jackson - Sep 1986

Puffin Books, Sep 1986. Paperback. This is one of the best Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, featuring an interactive, multi-layered gaming world which the player can travel through in a non-linear way, returning to previous locations and even recovering items (robots) left behind earlier. The setting and story is one of the most unusual in the whole FF series - the player takes on the role of a robot-pilot in a world full of dinosaurs, and the last human awake after an alien invasion. The settings are very cleverly constructed to allow the player to switch between robots and to offer no fewer than three "good" endings or solutions. \r\n\r\nThe cast of aliens, robots, dinosaurs, robot dinosaurs, flying dinosaurs, flying robots, transforming robots and so on, gives the book a distinct fantasy feel - it's reminiscent of TransFormers, and of certain Japanese mecha anime and manga. This kind of feel is far more "contemporary" in its sci-fi, as opposed to the dated B-movie feel of many sci-fi FF's.\r\n\r\nOne strength is the non-linear game map and the responsiveness of settings to timing (new occurrences sometimes marking second visits). I feel this is a world the reader really wants to explore, and to find all three paths through. Some useful items and information are hidden in unusual places - it isn't always obvious where the player should go or how items might be useful.\r\n\r\nAnother is the intelligent use of the robot element to introduce new rules and variables - different skill bonuses for robot and personal combat, speed differentials affecting combat, situations where outcomes vary with robot type, and so on.\r\n\r\nMy only complaint is that it ends too soon - perhaps because of its logical spatial arrangement and multi-layered map, it's easy to figure out where one hasn't explored and where a missing item might be, and the easiest ending takes minimum effort to find (the other two are more standard combat-based FF endings).