Back in 2014, my brother introduced me to this awesome game where you could build your own robot and take it into battle. I was instantly hooked.
I remember designing all sorts of crazy contraptions like airplanes, hovercrafts, and even tiny zippy cars taking them into the arena. As I progressed, I unlocked better blocks and built more advanced bots. The best part? I knew all the quirks of my designs, so I could use them in ways no one else could.
Early on, the game had a tech tree. You’d unlock new parts as you leveled up, then buy them to upgrade your bot. The goal in battle was to destroy the pilot seat — that was the bot’s weak point. So players started surrounding it with their strongest blocks, making their bots nearly invincible.
Eventually, though, the devs removed the pilot seat mechanic, now you had to destroy the entire bot to get a kill. Not long after, they scrapped the tech tree and introduced loot crates instead. And just like that… the magic started to fade.
The game used to be one of the best. I had over 800 hours in it. I reinstalled it a few times after quitting, just to see if it had gotten better. But it only got worse. One of the last things I remember was how they ruined the plane physics.
You used to be able to build proper aircraft, testing the center of lift, weight, and thrust, tweaking it until your plane actually flew. Then they dumbed it all down. Suddenly, your plane couldn’t roll past 45°, and you could slap wings on a rectangle and it would magically fly "perfectly fine." Nothing made sense anymore.
And of course, the players who had premium could kill you in three shots, while you emptied all your ammo trying to knock off a couple blocks from their bots.
I was actually thinking about reinstalling the game recently, just to see what it looked like now… but I couldn’t find it on Steam. I looked it up and found out they shut down the servers — not just for Robocraft, but also Robocraft 2 (don’t even get me started on Robocraft 2, that was a mess from day one).
In a way, I’m glad they’re gone. The devs kind of deserved it for what they did to the game. But still… I really miss the old Robocraft.
There are still subreddits and communities full of people reminiscing about how good Robocraft used to be, and how every update seemed to make things worse. I could go into more detail but they changed game modes too many times, and while a few updates had good ideas, they’d always ruin it again in the next one.
The screenshots in this post are personal from when i used to play showing some of the bots i built way back in the day
