Bot Battalion

Bot Battalion is a small real-time strategy game played on a garage floor. The arena is concrete with taped-off lanes, oil stains and walls built out of cardboard cartons and toolboxes, and everything fighting over it is a toy: rounded steel robots with big eyes, a painted team stripe and a tool bolted to one arm. Your welders trundle out to the heaps of bolts and springs, carry a load back to the factory and go again, and that steady trickle of scrap is the whole game. Spend it on bots, spend it on a better factory, or spend it on a nail turret covering the door — you cannot have all three at once.

The factory stamps out six chassis. Scouts are cheap and fast and see a long way. Welders gather, build and mend. Brawlers wade in with mallet fists, blasters fire nails from well back, drones fly straight over the cardboard and tanks lob a spring-loaded shell that catches everything standing too close together. Upgrade the press to open the second and third tiers, put up turrets and a repair bay, and pick your fights: the bots walk around obstacles on their own, hold a loose formation, shoot at whatever wanders into range and turn round and run home when you tell them to.

Ten missions take you from a quiet warm-up on the practice bots to a two-factory floor boss, by way of holding the bench, freeing three boxed-up drones, taking the scrap yard in the middle and breaking a line of turrets. Each one is scored on time and on how many bots you lost, so the third star is worth going back for, and your stars are kept in your browser. Outside the missions there is a free skirmish on three floors against an opponent that gathers and builds exactly like you do, at Easy, Normal or Sharp — and Sharp scouts you out, builds against whatever it finds and sends runners after your welders. Drag a box round your bots and right-click to move them on a desktop, or tap a group button and tap the floor on a phone, with a minimap, a pause key and a double-speed button for the long build-ups.