Pit Droids was the fourth title to be released by Lucas Learning the educational offshoot of LucasArts. It's a puzzle game based around routing strategies, ratios and pattern matching. It's pitched at ages 9 and up but the harder puzzles prove entertaining for adults as well.

The game is set around the memorable pod racing scene from Episode 1 and action opens with Watto, the local junk shop owner, just having taken a shipment of Pit Droids. Somehow he's ordered more that he can manage himself and he needs your help to sort and categorise the droids. Unfortunately for you the droids, despite their ability to repair racers, have no sense of direction and left unattended can only walk in a straight line which can lead to their destruction when they pass over a fan or walk into another hapless droid.

Your objective is to move the Pit Droids through 8 different areas on Tatooine with the final goal being the Pod Race arena. You move droids from one area to the next by solving puzzles. Each puzzle starts with 48 droids, you complete the puzzle when all the droids have reached their destination or if you're having difficulty with a puzzle you can choose to leave it when fewer droids have reached their destination. If you do abandon without completing the puzzle you will have to play through more puzzles to transfer some extra droids through the game areas to make up for the droids that didn't make it.

All the levels entail moving Pit Droids from their starting positions to one or more possible end points. During the early levels of the game all the droids are the same uniform grey colour but as the game develops they start to come with different body and helmet colours. They also pick up a variety of objects to hold such as crates, ladders and fire extinguishers.

Several obstacles are in your way, these might include fans that you must cross at the right time, blocks that can only be passed by a droid of the right colour or carrying the right object, or unmovable tiles that redirect droids without your control.

To make your way across the square or hexagonal grid you have a variety of tiles that you can place on the grid, these tiles change the direction of the droids that pass over them. On some levels you recieve more than needed to complete the puzzle but on others there's just the right amount and this impacts on your route planning. Tiles become available that have a defined ratio to their impact, i.e. a 3:1 tile will redirect the first 3 droids in your specified direction and the fourth droid will be allowed to pass straight over.

You can play through the game on Easy, Medium or Difficult. This not only defines the difficulty of the puzzles but also the number of droids you start the game with. To complete the game you must get 144 droids to the end zone of the Pod Race arena, in Difficult mode you start with only 240 droids so you can only afford to loose 96 droids along the way, effectively this means you can only skip 2 puzzles.

The droids can be reset to their starting positions as many times as you like whilst you're playing a puzzle, giving you plenty of chances to perfect your route. Unfortunately there is no option to abandon a puzzle without chalking it up as a defeat, this can become a bit of a problem when you are playing the more difficult puzzles and you have to leave the game to do something else. The only way to work around this problem is to make sure you save your position after each level.

A decent number of training missions are provided, voiced by everyone's favourite protocol droid 3-CPO (performed by Anthony Daniels himself). A quick overview is available to get you going and further missions are available that explain how the different types of tiles and obstacles work. The game is really intuitive enough that you probably won't need most of the training however it's handy if you get stuck.

Lucas Learning pitch their titles as educational, so what does Pit Droids have to offer. Its pitch centres on teaching mathematical and logical thinking, specifically Set Theory, Geometric and Spacial Relationships, Ratios and finally Functions. To some extent you have to wonder if the game came first and if the educational benefits were tacked on to give what is effectively a puzzle game a grander purpose. Whilst some knowledge of the mathematical concepts involved is required there is no guidance or explanation to the student about these theories or how they apply to the game they are playing.

The graphics in the game are just about okay but unfortunately they're limited in resolution to 640x480, this can sometime make it harder than necessary to see what time of object a droid is carrying. Apart from that they do the job but there's nothing special to note.

There's little graphical difference between each area in the game beyond the style of the walls and the type of junk that's lying around. Sometimes the walls get in the way of seeing what's going on, so handily there's a 'flatten walls' toggle which clears your any unnecessary items from your view. You can also overlay a grid onto the area to show you where tiles can be positioned, this can be especially useful when playing on the hexagonal grids. Between each area you are rewarded with a brief cutscene featuring the pit droids up to their inept mad cap antics, these are squarely aimed at the younger players and offer a bit of light relief.

A puzzle maker is included in the game which is pretty easy to pick up and use, it's not so easy to make decent puzzles though. A few are included that you can use as a starting point which may give you some ideas. When Pit Droids was first launched there was the promise of an online trading site where you could upload your puzzles, I don't remember if this ever materialised and even if it did it's not around any more. If you're itching to share your puzzles mail them to us at swgamer and we'll put them online here.

The Pit Droids CD contains binaries for both PCs and Macs so if you've got both platforms in your house there's no need to shell out for another copy if you want to switch between one or the other.

In summary Pit Droids is a decent enough puzzle game although it doesn't really have any catch that'll keep you playing week after week. Fun for the kids though and hopefully it will assist in improving their logical reasoning skills.

A demois available if you'd like to check to see if this game is suitable for your kids or even yourself, it contains a selection of levels from the full game but no training is provided.