The problem with the robots is that they destroy a core aspect of Fallout Tactics: Versatility.
The game copy/pastes the SPECIAL skill-system from Fallout 1 & 2, yet the game itself is almost 100% devoted to the combat aspect of the game - meaning that far too many skill are 100% useless. But that's not the main gripe.
The SPECIAL system allows for 6 different schools of combat: Small Guns, Big Guns, Energy Weapons, Melee Weapons, Thrown Weapons and Unarmed, and provides plenty of means for the player to develop and refine those skills so that a character can be kick-ass in one of those. FT does its bit in this regard, so all's good... until you get to the robots.
I can't remember exactly how it was trying to use Melee Weapons against Robots, but try using an Unarmed build-character against them. You might as well throw tomatoes for all it's gonna do. In a quest to create a "new" enemy/challenge for the player AND have the entire game a pre-determined order of escalating fights, the devs screwed the pooch big time. At least two schools of combat are invalidated in the endgame, rendered utterly useless. This isn't like the tough uphill battle with the big pay-off that Big Guns and Energy Weapons have to deal with, this is just absolute shut-down. All that work building up a character to be harder than Bruce Lee, and he's rendered useless at the drop of a hat. Meanwhile Small Guns users are "compensated" by being granted access to all kinds of robot-slaying gear, and the oldest robot-slaying weapon of them all is a grenade.
So yeah. :/
