Free robot games

What makes a good robot game

Robots make good game characters because they can be anything: a small hero on tracks, a crowd of chunky bots on a factory floor, a wind-up toy coming off a conveyor belt or a machine that has to be stopped before it reaches the hull. In a robot game the robots are either the ones you play, the ones you build, or the ones you are up against, and often all three.

The seven robot games on Kiloo come from six different categories: tower defence, strategy, platform, idle, shooting and physics. That gives you very different ways to play with the same idea, from a calm puzzle about flipping gravity to a neon arena where laser bolts bounce off the walls. The robots are cartoon machines throughout, and when they lose they tumble, bonk or fall apart into springs and bolts. Your progress and high scores are kept in the browser you play in.

Robot games to start with

Robo Rescue is a calm place to begin. A small tracked robot works through twenty-four single-screen rooms in a white laboratory, waking friends asleep in glass pods. Flip the room's gravity, shove crates onto pressure plates, ride conveyor belts and bend a laser with a mirror; every room has one idea to work out and a gentle hint if you get stuck. Robot Factory is the idle choice: hit the big red button, and tin is pressed, welded, painted and wound into a smiling wind-up robot worth bolts, which you spend on better machines and a crew that cranks for you.

Slingshot Siege has you pull back a slingshot and knock over towers of crates, planks and glass so the robot dummies on top tumble into a padded pit. Bot Battalion is real-time strategy: put welders on the scrap piles, build six kinds of bot and send scouts, brawlers, blasters and a tank across the floor against a side doing the same. Orbital Defense is tower defence on a space station's outer ring, with laser turrets, flak cannons and EMP coils holding off fifteen waves of combat robots, a mech walker and a Dreadnought.

For action, Robot Rumble is a run-and-gun platformer where a small round robot with a toy blaster shoots in eight directions through eight comic-book stages, each ending with a boss machine that shows its attacks before they land. Ricochet Arena puts you in a hover-tank firing laser bolts that bounce off metal walls up to three times, so you bank them round pillars into bots that shoot back.

Controls on a keyboard, mouse and touch screen

The action games use the keyboard most. Robot Rumble runs and aims with the arrows or WASD, jumps with Space or K and fires with J or Z; hold to charge a mega shot. Ricochet Arena drives with WASD and aims with the mouse, and Robo Rescue moves with the arrows, grabs with E and flips gravity with F or Shift. The strategy and puzzle games are mouse games: click a hex pad to build in Orbital Defense, drag to select bots in Bot Battalion, and drag back from the slingshot in Slingshot Siege.

On a phone or tablet, Robot Rumble and Ricochet Arena show on-screen sticks and buttons, Robo Rescue has touch buttons to move and jump, and the rest switch to taps and drags. In Ricochet Arena, watch the aim line that shows your first bounce, and keep clear of your own bolts on the way back. In Orbital Defense, shields have to be stripped before the damage gets through.

Frequently asked questions