RoboSquare: Recharged

RoboSquare: Recharged is an online multiplayer party game about hovering robots and the appalling things they do to each other. Up to 16 players drop into a lobby, play five randomly chosen minigames back to back, and score points every round until one bot is crowned champion. There is no meta to study and no loadout to optimise. There is you, a floating metal square, and fifteen other people who would very much like you to be somewhere else. Ideally off the edge.

Your bot floats, which sounds elegant until you realise floating things do not stop when you want them to. Momentum is your best weapon and your worst habit. You get three tools and one very short attention span:

• Jump to get airborne, clear a gap, or leave the ground before someone else decides you should

• Dash to close distance fast, steal a checkpoint, or ram a stranger into a pit

• Slam to drop out of the sky like a wrecking ball and launch everyone nearby into the sunset

Every hit you take rattles you a little more, and take enough of them and you are watching from the respawn timer while someone else banks your points.

• Race: Obstacle courses full of swinging hammers, boost pads, moving platforms and cannons that were absolutely not there last lap.

• Sumo: Last bot on the platform wins. The platform is smaller than you think and your friends are worse than you remember.

• King of the Hill: Hold the zone. The zone moves. Everyone has noticed the zone moved.

• Infection: Survivors run, the infected multiply, and the last clean bot alive gets the glory.

• Capture the Core: Team warfare over cores, where one dedicated slammer can ruin an entire strategy.

Mid round, things go wrong on purpose. Gravity gets lazy. Wind picks a direction and commits. Bombs start falling. Sometimes a UFO turns up and starts helping itself to whoever is winning. You cannot plan for it. That is the point.

Party up with your Steam friends and roll into a lobby together, or jump in solo and find a game.

Mix and match bot bodies, hover thrusters, finishes, decals and colours until your robot looks like nothing else in the lobby. Collect rare cosmetics, unbox crates, and pick a colour scheme so loud that being eliminated first still counts as a personality.

Every hit, jump, dash, slam and metre travelled is tracked. Matches end with personal accolades (Speed Demon, Ground Pounder, Sky King, Comeback Kid) and the game quietly works out who your rival is based on how often the two of you keep crashing into each other. Global Steam leaderboards track your lifetime totals, so there is always someone to catch and always someone catching you.

Grab some friends. Bring sixteen.