Following the fall of Axie Infinity last year, numerous games have wanted to take their spot as the no.1 play-to-earn game in the crypto space. Development of games that are similar to what Axie Infinity offered to the market has increased as investors flock in looking for that “next big game” on the blockchain that would offer the profit Axie Infinity offered during their boom in May 2021. One promising contender that has a lot of eyes on them right now is Rebel Bots: Xoil Wars. 

Rebel Bots - Xoil Wars is a digital collectible card game developed on the Polygon blockchain by Xoilium Ltd. and backed by gaming giant Ubisoft. They have a goal of making NFTs have an actual use other than just serving as artworks on the internet. The first game in the Rebel Bots Universe they are making is Xoil Wars. They opened the project with the token sale followed by the initial release of their first NFT Kingdom Lord Collection. Being a holder of one of these NFT Rebel Lords makes you an NFT land owner in Xoil Wars and this is where you store the three rebel bots that you use to battle in Xoil wars.

Xoil Wars will have two gameplay modes upon its release in June; Adventure Mode and a Multiplayer PVP mode. The gameplay on multiplayer will be similar to Axie Infinity where each part of the robot corresponds to different cards with each card having varied abilities and attacks to help you win against your opponent. The fighting bots have three classes - Military, Industrial, and Engineer. The players can then take parts from each class and mix and match it until it fits their individual playstyle. I think most people coming from Axie infinity can adjust easily to this game since almost all the mechanics are the same. The only thing players have to adjust for is the cards and their abilities. 

I liked the user interface of the game. It looked easy to navigate and really neat. There is no cluttering of game elements and you have a lot of space to click. A nice design choice considering that this will be translated to mobile as well. However, based on the gameplay video they posted on their YouTube channel, the animations and sound effects on the game could use more work. Guns felt like it was shooting Q-tips because the sound doesn’t go hard enough.  The kicks, punches, and stabbing of the robots look soft because of the slow animation combined with a mismatched sound which made it look like a kid is playing with two plastic robot toys adding his own sound effects which I think is pretty tame for a game called Rebel Bots Xoil Wars.

Although the clip was just from the alpha stage of the game, I hope they use these opinions to make their game better and enjoyable since a lot of people (including me) see a lot of promise in the game. Who would’ve thought you can merge Axie infinity with Pokemon and Clash of Clans with that land gameplay?

I believe that the land gameplay is also a nice way to encourage players to spend the coins they earn back in the game which can help make the economy of the game healthier. The developers looked like they took the Axie Infinity playbook and made changes to the issues they saw in the game to make it better. I just hope that they can implement it properly to prevent another play-to-earn game catastrophe.

Overall, I think the project has a lot of potential and I am looking forward to the further development of the game even after its launch. I hope the issues I pointed out are resolved by the time they officially launch the game to the public. I also think that adding more classes can help diversify the game even more and keep it engaging for longer to avoid the game from going stale. I hope  Rebel Bots is the worthy successor of Axie that people speculate to be.