The Collection Chamber: STAR WARS: PIT DROIDS

Pit Droid Pandemonium!

Watto's pit droids must get to the Podraces, but they need your help! Guide these manic mechanics through mind-bending mazes and puzzles as you race through Tatooine's treacherous environments. With this crew, chaos is on the move!

It's an easy game to learn... and a hard habit to break. Prepare to be hooked!
Pick up colours and tools to complicate matters. The further you go, the tougher it gets.
Progress through challenging levels and be rewarded with slapstick animated clips.
Design your own puzzle maker! Email or post your Puzzle on the web or challenge your friends.
8 challenging game levels
300+ puzzles
6 unique Star Wars game environments
Create your own custom-made puzzles
Exciting 3D graphics
16 original, toe-tapping music tracks
Online Puzzle Exchange

~ from the back of the box

If there around and conscious in 1999, Star Wars was everywhere. The hype for The Phantom Menace permeated everything with an absolutely staggering merchandising campaign. Action figures, LEGO sets, books, fast-food promotions, breakfast cereals, crisps, novelty sweets and enough video games to fill a sarlacc stomach. Everyone wanted a piece of the new Star Wars pie. One of those video games was Star Wars: Pit Droids, a rather unassuming puzzler from LucasArt's Lucas Learning division that tasks you with herding a bunch of clumsy incompetent robots.

Being from the educational wing of the Lucas empire, this game not only required some sneaky teachings of boring subjects, but it also had to do it in a way that was imaginative and entertaining rather than something that felt like homework. No Star Wars fan wants that. Many of Lucas Learning's early releases leaned towards the younger end of the market, with animated adventures and activity-centre-style experiences among the company's output. But Pit Droids, however, is something different. It's still aimed squarely at young players, but underneath the colourful presentation is a proper puzzle game that can give adults plenty to think about too. In fact, the fact that it was marketed squarely at a younger audience may have risked alienating older players who may have found it to be just as enjoyable for their grown-up tastes. It's certainly a puzzle game for all ages.

C-3PO's tutorial guides you through the game's mechanics (left).

If you forget what he says, use R2-D2 any time for a refresher (right).

The premise is simple. Watto has acquired a shipment of pit droids, those gangly little DUM-series maintenance robots who are getting themselves into all kinds of clumsy japes. In the game, they're supposed to make their way from a transport ship to the Podrace Arena, but they have one rather unfortunate programming quirk: left to their own devices, they'll simply keep marching forwards. You don't directly control them. Instead, you place directional arrows in their path, changing where the procession goes as it trundles merrily towards whatever hazards happen to be lying ahead. Anyone familiar with Lemmings will immediately recognise the basic concept, although Pit Droids is more concerned with carefully routing streams of robots than rescuing suicidal rodents. At first, simply pointing a droid towards an exit is enough. Then the game starts adding complications, and before long you'll be staring at a screen full of mechanical idiots wondering how on earth you're going to get all of them home.

There are three difficulty settings, with Easy giving you an effectively unlimited supply of droids, Medium giving you 480 and Difficult reducing that to 240. The levels vary in each so it's worth playing all of them, but seasoned players may want to start with hard. There is also a dedicated Puzzle Training area containing twenty lessons, each concentrating on a particular tile or puzzle concept, with C-3PO on hand to explain the rules, offer hints and, if necessary, simply show you the solution. It's an excellent way of gradually introducing the game's increasingly complex mechanics. Basic white Direction Arrows send droids whichever way they're pointing, while Colour, Tool and Helmet Colour Arrows only affect droids possessing the appropriate attribute. Limited Arrows redirect only a specified number of droids, and Ratio Arrows can do things such as redirect two droids before allowing one through, repeatedly.

Turn on the floor guides for a better idea of where to place your puzzle pieces (left).
When you complete a stage in the main game, you're rewarded with a humorous animation (right).

And that's only the beginning. Pit Droids can be equipped with different tools, including ladders, fire extinguishers, wrenches and crates, while their body and helmet colours can add more variances from which they must be sorted. Barriers can allow or block droids according to those attributes, Transformers can change them, Keys can open Locks elsewhere in the puzzle and Fans introduce a particularly nasty element of timing by periodically switching between safe and lethal states. Then there are the occasions when multiple streams of droids have to be threaded together without colliding which can be more difficult than it seems. A wrong decision could remove a whole bunch of droids from your pool, limiting your final score. Thankfully, you can easily reset a puzzle without removing already placed tiles which can also be moves with ease. This leniency is perhaps the biggest tell that it was designed for young kids. Even so, the later stages that deal with complex sorting and routing are still likely to tickle the old brain cells.

The really clever part is that all this puzzle-solving is secretly mathematics in disguise. The manual explains that Pit Droids is intended to teach the mathematics of the information age through logical reasoning, pattern recognition, spatial relationships, ratios, functions and set theory. Ratio Arrows are an especially neat example: instead of being told to solve a dry maths problem, you're simply trying to figure out which sequence of droids needs to go down which path. A 2:1 Ratio Arrow, for instance, redirects two droids, lets one pass, then repeats the pattern. The game therefore manages to teach mathematical concepts in such a sneaky and subtle way, a fraction-phobic child wouldn't even notice. They'll too busy trying to prevent a tiny yellow robot with a wrench from wandering into a fan to notice that they're actually learning about ratios and sets.

The level editor is incredibly robust and easy to use. The icons on each side of the screen

lets you place basic pieces. Click on them in the map to open up more complex options.

If the hundreds of built-in puzzles somehow aren't enough, Pit Droids has also has its very own Puzzle Maker. This is a surprisingly featureful application that's so easy to use, anyone could conjure up a complex teasers in no time. You can create puzzles from scratch, select locations, place walls, launchers and all those obstacles you'll encounter in the main game, then test the result to make sure it can actually be solved. Existing puzzles can be used as starting points, while C-3PO will walk budding designers through the process in a surprisingly thorough tutorial. If you've missed anything, you can click on the R2-D2 icon which provide text explanations of each feature when the mouse hovers over them. The original game even supported exchanging custom puzzles with other players through its website, complete with downloadable creations and puzzle-making contests, though the march of time have made this somewhat obsolete. Considering this was a 1999 educational game, the whole thing is remarkably full package. It feels less like an afterthought and more like Lucas Learning genuinely wanted children to experiment with the same puzzle-design principles that went into the game itself.

For something ostensibly designed to sneak mathematics into children's entertainment, I had a frankly ridiculous amount of fun with Pit Droids. The Star Wars licence certainly helps, with Tatooine locations, C-3PO's guidance, R2-D2's helpful explanations and wonderfully silly pit droids giving the whole thing a personality of its own, but the licence isn't what makes the game work. Underneath the space opera is an exceptionally well-designed puzzle game that steadily introduces new ideas and combines them in increasingly clever ways. Even if I would've liked it to have gone much further than it does, that's probably just me being greedy. Lucas Learning produced a number of unusually inventive educational games around this period, including DroidWorks and The Gungan Frontier that are already reviewed on this site, but for me Pit Droids is the pick of the bunch. It's educational without being preachy, accessible without being simplistic and challenging without being frustrating. A genuine hidden gem.

To download the game, follow the link below. This a custom installer exclusive to The Collection Chamber uses DREAMM to run on modern systems. Manual included. Read the ChamberNotes.txt for more detailed information. Tested on Windows 11.

File Size: 399 Mb. Install Size: 530 Mb. Need help? Consult the Collection Chamber FAQ

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