How upcoming super-slick PS4 card battler Insane Robots favours fun over deck-building busywork ~ PS4 games

mardi 26 juin 2018

How upcoming super-slick PS4 card battler Insane Robots favours fun over deck-building busywork

08:25 PlayStation.Blog.Europe No comments

Insane Robots is a unique card battler with intense multiplayer battles, a huge one-player campaign, randomly generated battle arenas, and a unique cast of beautifully illustrated robots. With all of that added, we took away two big things normally associated with the genre that some players hate: time-consuming deck building and expensive card collecting. This enabled us to make something really special.

And we are super pumped to announce that the game will be coming to PlayStation on 10th July.

A long time ago…

Although the game comes out this summer we started work on it in 2013 when we built the core of the battle system using some old business cards. The Playniac team then took the game on tour, playing it with friends, family and strangers, at festivals and events, around the world. All the time we worked on the gameplay, mainly the battle system, making it more and more fun to play.

With the raw material being just cards, it was quick and easy to add in new elements and develop existing ones. By 2015 we were ready to enter the digital realm, confident that we had a core game that was a lot of fun to play.

Pulling no punches

The Insane Robots battle system is super easy to grasp. Each robot has two main circuits, attack and defence, and these circuits must be powered up with tokens for them to work. As well as your own circuits you are able to be sneaky and attack the enemy robot’s circuits using hacks or glitches, to make them malfunction.

All Insane Robots can all be augmented to give them additional skills. In multiplayer these 100+ augments are randomised before battle to deliver an ever-changing experience. In the one-player campaign these can be discovered and equipped to give you the best chance of defeating the increasingly difficult robot opponents.

Less admin, more fun

So, all the elements of card battles are there, but the way that Insane Robots introduces and employs them is super-slick. And we wanted to go even further in our quest to make the genre more accessible: we removed the need to spend ages building and editing decks before going into battle, and we won’t be releasing huge collections of confusing and costly add on card packs after launch either.

We feel it isn’t necessary and helps us shift the focus away from boring ‘admin’ to enable players to get right to heart of the fun battles. This also means that players who don’t want to buy extra cards won’t be left behind.

Ready one player

One of the big elements we added in the transition to digital was the 16+ hour single player campaign.

In this you explore a hex-based map and battle in tournaments that take place in procedurally generated arenas. As you traverse the map you have to avoid environmental hazards like the acid cloud or the ring of death, as well as other robots.

Or, you can chase enemy robots around the map and challenge them to a duel to the death! This is where strategy comes into play, with a ‘rogue-lite’ system which means you can lose everything you’ve collected, but only in that tournament – we’re not that cruel!

The single player campaign is driven by a huge story, where users are given multiple choices as they voyage through the five sprawling environments. Each decision plunges you deeper into the world of Insane Robots and leads to a seminal showdown that will put all your battle skills to the test.