I respect a game with a name that doesn’t give anything away. Insane Robots could be anything from a Platinum-style action brawler to an idle Cookie Clicker-alike. Yet here it is, a roguelike deck-builder with tactics elements, released on July 12th, 2018 by UK developers Playniac.
Premise and Gameplay
You are Franklin (or one of many unlockable alternatives), a robot with memory malfunctions that has begun asking questions, and robots shouldn’t be doing that. This qualifies as insanity, and insane robots are not considered able to aid humanity. Therefore, you have been ‘selected for volunteering’ into the Arenas, where you do battle for survival against other alleged defectives, because entertainment is now all you are fit for.
The Arenas themselves are hex-based, which feels a bit like Game Boy Wars, if you’re familiar. (The strategy gamers among you probably have a better comparison.) You and other combatants take turns moving around, picking up goodies, entering shops, or encountering random scenarios that may improve your odds in combat. These maps have features such as terrain bonuses or fogs of war that obscure opponents and obtainables.
Once you actually run into another robot, battle is joined. At first, it’s business as usual: draw chips (our ‘cards’ in this case) from your deck and use your limited energy to play them. Then it gets wacky. This is a little hard to convey in writing, but you and your opponent have limited slots called ‘circuits’ that you can fit chips into: two for attacking, two for defending, and one for added boosts. The twist: you can’t just, say, drop a chip for blocking three damage into a slot and immediately be protected from the next three points of incoming damage. No, the circuits must be completed – both slots must be filled. For example, put a chip that blocks two points of damage in defence slot one and another that blocks four points of damage in defence slot two and you’re ready to block a total of six incoming damage, but neither one will do anything by themselves.
Once you’ve wrapped your head around that, the madness (insanity, one dares, even) begins proper when you start getting chips that swap the defense or attacking values of player’s respective slots, or randomise them entirely, or lock them off from being interfered with by the opponent, amongst other effects. Because both sides can usually see what’s going on in their opponent’s slots, you are always trying to think a move ahead of one another: are they going to complete that scarily large attack circuit they’re building, or should you just wallop them while they have empty defense slots?
Randomised Elements
The interesting thing to take into account is that the CPU opponents have more or less the same ‘cards’ as you, but they also have to move around the hex maps to fight you in the first place. They may not always go straight for you either: it’s quite satisfying to see two CPU enemies go after and whittle one another down while you hide in the shadows ready to ambush the survivor. However, if you’re trying to get the highest score possible (you are rewarded 1-3 stars upon completing an Arena tournament), then it’s in your best interests to be proactive in going after enemies first. HP isn’t restored between fights, so you’ve got to be careful. The amount of money you have left over at the end of each also affects your star grading. This actually discourages spending money on upgrading your ‘bot, forcing you to try to make do with what you start off with. However, this also means you’re partly at the mercy of whatever random paths they decide to move around in on the map. I’ve had more than one tournament where it’s just me and one enemy left and they’ve given me the runaround, spending several turns chasing them around the map until I can reach and fight them.
The types of chips that you draw into your hand each round are random, and the only way to actually manipulate what types you get is to buy robot upgrades (called ‘augments’) that alter the probability of certain types being drawn more often. In this sense, you deck-influence more than deck-build. These augments confer all manner of boons inside and outside of combat, like increasing the likelihood of drawing chips that interfere with your opponent, or raising the number of hexes you can move around the maps. Certain robots come with certain augments right out of the gate, so it’s a case of finding a playstyle you enjoy more than overcoming the unique challenges offered by different character classes. It’s an enjoyable bit of trial-and-error.
The only real problem I have with IR is that there is too much push-and-pull in most combat encounters. By that, I mean that the sense that you are winning or losing is switched up on you many, many times before a result is secured, and often simply because of literal luck of the draw. In moderation, this is typically welcome: what would games be without feeling like you’d overcome a challenge or absolutely crushed an enemy thanks to good planning and execution? Unfortunately, this gets exhausting when you’ve been in the same battle for ten minutes and both sides have turned the tables on one another again and again. This gets a bit more dispiriting when you finally win a real knock-down-drag-out fight but have so little health remaining that you are forced to find a repair shop and heal (which will come at the cost of a higher grade/score for this tournament – remember, you’re trying to spend as little money as possible) to reduce the likelihood of getting wiped out in your next battle. I’m willing to concede this could just be a ‘me’ thing though – this genre is nothing if not spoiled for variety in combat pacing, so you may welcome a slower one more than I personally do. The upshot is that the more time spent resulted in a greater sense of achievement when I finally overcame a particularly challenging tournament by the skin of my teeth. Local and online two-player options are included. I couldn’t get the online working, but I imagine having someone else playing to laugh and argue with would go a long way to mitigating the drain of a long combat encounter.
Presentation
The character designs are sweet without being twee, and have a certain bobblehead charm to the way they sway back and forth while attacking or getting attacked. They also have very nice robotic text-to-speech style voice clips when attacking that remind me of the Radiohead song ‘Fitter Happier’. Maps are easy to interpret at all times, and the UI is clean and easy to parse. Little about how the game looks is likely to blow your mind, but it will also never get in the way of your decision-making, which should never be taken for granted.
Special credit to the music, which veers between atmospheric ambient pieces and more appropriately exciting up-tempo stuff when fights kick off. Most of all, I was surprised at how much of it there actually was before I noticed anything repeated across levels, and even then – importantly – very little of it got on my nerves after several loops. In particular, the title screen music is a treat for me as a surf-rock fan.
Closing Remarks
The store page boasts a 15+ hour campaign and I’m sure there’s a lot more to it than that if it gets its hooks in. It certainly reminded me of Advance Wars more than once, and those are fond memories indeed. The back-and-forth of every battle may get wearing or may actually be right up your alley, especially in two-player. Insane Robots is a great example of how surprisingly versatile even just the basic mechanics of the roguelike deck-builder are for a wide variety of genre fusions and story settings.
Standout Augments
Because every robot has the same chips/cards at their disposal, I’m going to use this space to focus on enhancement to the robots themselves that can affect their decks.
Shrunken Shrine 