- Robot Arena
- Robot Arena 2: Design & Destroy
- Robot Arena III
When Gabriel Interactive developed Robot Arena 2: Design & Destroy fans were eager to know what the potential third game would be like. Speculation ran rampant, hoax screenshots and news were shared, and forum threads talking about ideas and what players wanted stretched into dozens of pages. Despite the major glow-up that was Robot Arena 2 there wouldn’t be a follow-up game for a staggering thirteen years. But the player base was still there and when Robot Arena III was teased and announced out of the blue the community’s collective ears perked up. This was it. This was going to be the long awaited follow-up to perhaps the greatest robot combat game of all time. As it turns out this game would instead be that community’s Duke Nukem Forever.
Whereas Robot Arena 2 built upon everything laid out in the first game you wouldn’t be wrong to assume that the next game in the series would elevate the second game’s conventions to a higher level. After all this is what sequels are meant to do and after thirteen years of waiting expectations were high. When Robot Arena III launched on June 20, 2016 there was a burst of excitement followed immediately by the sense of dread that can only come with knowing there’s trouble in paradise. Robot Arena III wasn’t just a sub-par game, it was bad. Exceptionally bad.
Compartmentalizing Robot Arena III and detailing its failures is an undertaking. It’s like trick or treating exclusively in the neighborhood that gives out the worst candy. As of 2024, the game currently has a “Mostly Negative” score on Steam after 291 reviews. Not many reviews were posted because this is a niche game for a niche market and once word got out that the game was bad most people in said market refrained from purchasing it. The fact that it’s $19.99 and almost never shows up in Steam’s bi-annual super sales probably isn’t helping matters either.
The easiest place to start is with how sloppy the game’s presentation is. Robot Arena games of the past had fairly simple affairs with things like immediate access to the Bot Lab and Exhibition Mode front and center ready to go; Robot Arena III also has these things but the main menu is choked with other options taking up equal real estate. The game hits you with a lot all at once and the Bot Lab is one of the middle buttons, it’s not at the top where something as important as it should be. “Career Mode” has been removed from the Team section and added to the title screen while the Team option does little more than let you rename your team and see how many bots you’ve made (or downloaded from the Steam Workshop).
The new Bot Lab is complicated. Chassis design starts with the same grid paper drawing as Robot Arena 2 but what’s new here is that you can stretch and deform the chassis at multiple layers of either three or five, your choice. This allows for some interesting chassis designs, like a pickup truck for example, but the tools to scale and resize the layers are imprecise and have a learning curve. Adding parts to the chassis is a complete joke. Nothing has to be mounted to the baseplate anymore. In fact nothing has to be grounded to anything at all! You can have motors sinking through the bottom of your robot or literally floating in the air completely detached from everything. These floating motors and parts won’t fall to the ground either, they will stay floating right where they are in relation to your robot as you drive around.
The components you’re given to build with are largely just copied directly from Robot Arena 2. All of the parts from that game appear in Robot Arena III alongside an assortment of new mismatched parts that mostly seem decorative but are so ugly that nobody would reasonably want to use them on a design. Strangely all of the collision checks from the previous game are missing from Robot Arena III. You can break all known laws of physics by stacking batteries inside of batteries, daisy chain motors together, and attach wheels to things you normally shouldn’t be able to. The challenge of building a tough battle ready robot is essentially gone with the player having free reign to simply cheat like this. This makes building replicas of real life robots much easier however part of the allure of building replica robots in Robot Arena 2 came with that game’s restrictions on part placement. When you can just string a bunch of parts together and inside of each other suddenly that replica of former BattleBots champion Minion becomes a lot less impressive.
The enemy robots provided to the player in Robot Arena III are terrible designs; they’re either completely overpowered or built crooked or just otherwise unpleasant to look at. Even “EMERGENCY”, the most feared AI robot from Robot Arena 2, is just a shell of itself in this game. There are a few robots from previous Robot Arena games who return in some form either as a replica or with an “enhanced” design but they’re otherwise unmentionable. The AI that controls these robots in fights is even worse; robots will literally drive into hazards while attempting to engage with you or other AI opponents. Sometimes AI-controlled robots will also just stop moving for no apparent reason. It’s not that they’re damaged to the point of being knocked out, they just don’t move. Even as the game’s immobilization countdown starts the robots sit there and take the loss.
The entire game needed more time in the oven because there isn’t a single part of it that works or makes any sense at all and this isn’t even taking into account the bugs that plague this game. Sometimes, seemingly at random, when you try to save your progress in the Bot Lab the game will just “eat” your design. Your robot’s chassis will be rendered in white and all of its components will cluster at the origin point on the rotational axis. When this happens you cannot edit the robot or do anything with it to salvage it. You can’t even delete it. Sometimes during Career mode the game menu will just lock up and stop responding to anything you click on to try and play the next round. This results in your robot being permanently “locked” and unusable in the Bot Lab. While playing online against other players if there are less than the maximum of four sometimes a large white block reminiscent of Tofu from Resident Evil will spawn in one of the starting locations and can be attacked for easy and unlimited battle points since it cannot be KO’ed.
After a thirteen year wait Robot Arena III touched on exactly zero of the points of improvement that the game’s community wanted to see from a sequel to Robot Arena 2: Design & Destroy. Instead what we all got was a fundamentally broken game that wasn’t any fun to build robots in and even less fun to play.
