Insane Robots is Hearthstone meets Hunger Games

At Birmingham back in September Gamereactor spoke to Insane Robots' Creative Director Rob Davis about Playniac's upcoming game for PC and consoles.

Insane Robots is a turn-based, rogue-lite 2D strategy game where you battle for survival with token-based skirmishes in randomly generated arenas. The story sees you enter the arenas, where malfunctioning robots are forced to fight to the death, their battles beamed around the globe for entertainment. The robots' memories have been wiped so they cannot know their identities or why deep within their code they each carry the components of a powerful virus. You follow the story, unlocking memory fragments as you go whilst trying to discover the terrible truth at the heart of the game.

The combat system involves placing tokens to power up your robots or boost attack and defence in an effort to defeat your opponent. There are around 25 tokens in the deck, offering players lots of strategic versatility, as you can use their special boosts against enemies like hacking their defence.

Insane Robots has quite a fun, quirky design full of bright colours and cartoon style visuals. Each robot freedom fighter you unlock along the way, of which there are eight, has an individual look and design. They are also highly customisable, with around a hundred different power ups. These customisations will not carry over to the online multiplayer though, as Davis explained:

"You'll be given a random set of augments each of similar power, so that affects the strategy in your individual battles, so when you play a battle you're going to have to look at their augments and look at your augments and decide how you want to play and whether how to play safe and how to take risks and what to do to give yourself the best chances of winning that individual battle."

Insane Robots has been in development since 2015, but started its life in a completely different format. Playniac initially made a card-based version of the game they developed at the studio and took around various festivals to get a feel for people's response to the game.

"We used that as a chance to test and get the strategy really right in the token based battles, although actually that all changed a lot when we went to digital."

Insane Robots will be coming out in early 2017 on PC, Xbox one and PS4. How does this token-based combat sound to you?