My good friend Robert has been working on this for many years, and it's finally out for the public. For those of you who know what it is, XBolo is a fully Mac OS X native clone of the old Bolo game for the Mac, with live fullscreen graphics and much improved networking.

For those who don't know what it is, XBolo is a multiplayer action/strategy tank game. You drive a tank around a 2D world consisting of roads, forests, walls, and other terrain. At your disposal is a main gun, mines, and a "little green man" which you can send out to build things. Refueling bases replenish your supplies of armor, bullets, and mines, and your little green man can harvest trees for construction. Automatic pillboxes can be captured and used to set up automatic defenses. Although you come back to life every time you die, if all of your refueling bases are captured by the enemy, you won't be able to obtain fighting supplies and you'll be out of the game.

XBolo gameplay is fairly simple, using a few keyboard commands and obvious mouse commands. In a few minutes you can be driving around the world and blasting away at things. However, the modifiable terrain and dynamics of the automated pillboxes offer an incredible tactical and strategic depth. You can spend years playing this game and still find new and better ways of doing things.

XBolo is inherently multiplayer, and so isn't much fun by yourself. Hunt up some friends and go wild. It can be played with anywhere from 2 to 16 people, in teams or individually.

I've been playing the various prerelease versions of this game for months (and the original Bolo for years before that) and it's great fun. In my heavily biased opinion, no other multiplayer game can come close to the variety, longevity, and strategic depth. Check it out today!

Add your thoughts, post a comment:

Spam and off-topic posts will be deleted without notice. Culprits may be publicly humiliated at my sole discretion.