User Summary
B.A.T. is a French science-fiction adventure game with RPG elements. It's the beginning of the 22nd century and the Council of Galaxy faces a terrible threat: Vrangor, a scientist and escaped criminal has sent them an ultimatum: either the entire population of Terrapolis, capital city of Selenia is evacuated within 10 days and Selenia officially given to Vrangor, or the whole planet will be vaporized. Selenia being the only known source of khergol, the starship fuel, the Council sends an elite agent of the B.A.T. ("Bureau des Affaires Temporelles", Bureau of Temporal Affairs) to Terrapolis. His mission, find Vrangor and his accomplice Mérigo and stop them.
B.A.T. is primarily an adventure game in which the player explores the huge city of Terrapolis (more than 1000 different locations) looking for clues and questioning the population, but it also features some RPG elements (the character has stats and skills and there is a level-up system), and several games inside the game (a 3D flight simulator, fighting sequences...). The game uses a point-and-click system for player interaction, and a feature called B.O.B., a microcomputer carried by the character on his wrist that keeps track of the character stats, translate the languages spoken by the many different aliens and robots present in the game, and can even be programmed by the player (a BASIC-like scripting language with few features). Another feature of the game is its open-endedness, as players can use many different strategies to complete the steps required to find Mérigo and Vrangor.
The game received a lot of praises when it was released, earning a "Tilt d'or" as best computer game of the year by French videogame magazine Tilt.
