Robot Fighting Reality Series Robot Combat League Premieres Tonight On Syfy

Syfy will premiere their new reality competition series Robot Combat League tonight. The show has teams of two people set up to operate 8-feet-tall state-of-the-art humanoid robots, which will face off in the ring for combat-style fighting. If you've seen the film Real Steel, you have a general (albeit more futuristic) idea of how this works, except the reality of the technology isn't quite up to the state of things in Shawn Levy's 2011 film. But the robots and the fighting in this new series is still pretty impressive, regardless.

Hosted by WWE's Chris Jericho, Robot Combat League features twelve teams of two, with each team consisting of one fighter (a "robo-jockey") and one robotic engineer (a "robo-tech") from various backgrounds who will work together to maneuver their robot in the ring in the hopes of beating their opponent. As you'll see in the trailer below, a fair amount of boxing and engineering understanding and experience would go a long way in a competition like this.

The trailer gives us a glimpse of the high-tech exo-suit that contestants wear in order to control the movements of their robot. The first episode of the season will bring the contestants together and have them paired up into twelve teams of two, after which they're introduced to the robot they'll be operating, which has been designed and created by robotics experts. After that, the fighting begins! Which team will get their robot all the way to the end of this competition? That remains to be seen, but considering there are surely more advancements that can be made with the fighting robots, this series could be the start of something very exciting for Syfy.

Robot Combat League premieres tonight (Tuesday, February 26) at 10:00 p.m. ET on Syfy.

Kelly West
Assistant Managing Editor

Kelly joined CinemaBlend as a freelance TV news writer in 2006 and went on to serve as the site’s TV Editor before moving over to other roles on the site. At present, she’s an Assistant Managing Editor who spends much of her time brainstorming and editing feature content on the site. She an expert in all things Harry Potter, books from a variety of genres (sci-fi, mystery, horror, YA, drama, romance -- anything with a great story and interesting characters.), watching Big Brother, frequently rewatching The Office, listening to Taylor Swift, and playing The Sims.