RoboSquare: Recharged

RoboSquare: Recharged is an online multiplayer party game about hovering robots and the appalling things they do to each other. Up to 16 players drop into a lobby and play five randomly chosen minigames back to back. Everything you earn goes into your vault, and the biggest vault after five rounds takes the crown. There is no meta to study and no loadout to optimize. There is you, a floating metal square, and fifteen other people who would very much like you to be somewhere else. Ideally off the edge.

Your bot floats, which sounds elegant until you realize floating things do not stop when you want them to. Momentum is your best weapon and your worst habit. You get three tools and one very short attention span:

• Jump to get airborne, clear a gap, or leave the ground before someone else decides you should

• Dash to close distance fast, beat someone to a drop-off, or ram a stranger into a pit

• Slam to drop out of the sky like a wrecking ball. The further you fall, the bigger the blast: a hop shoves one bot, a drop from the rooftops clears the street.

Every hit you take rattles you a little more. Take enough of them and you are watching from the respawn timer while someone else counts your money.

Every minigame pays into the same vault, so a bad round costs you and a good one can turn the whole match.

• Delivery Race: Every checkpoint is a drop-off and every drop-off pays. Take them in any order you like. The golden crate at the finish only opens once the rest are delivered.

• Vault Raid: Knock a bot off the platform and a cut of everything it has earned leaves with you. The platform is smaller than you think and your friends are worse than you remember.

• Heist: A bank truck is driving around the arena with the round's money in it. Stay close and it pays out, and the fewer bots sharing, the bigger the cut. It does not stop for anyone.

• Hold The Bag: A few bots are holding bags that pay every second. Touch one and the bag is yours, along with everyone who was chasing it.

• Capture the Core: Team warfare over cores, where one dedicated slammer can ruin an entire strategy.

Partway through a round, the game spins a reel, lands on something, and gives you three seconds to think about it. Then it does it again. Events stack, and none of them wait for the last one to finish.

• Falling Bombs: Bombs drop out of the sky. Be somewhere else.

• UFOs: Saucers drift over the crowd and beam up whoever is underneath.

• Cyber Pirates: Pirate ships circle overhead and fire cannonballs into the arena. They are not aiming at anyone in particular, which does not help.

• Wind Storm: A gale picks a direction and commits to it. So does everyone standing in it.

• Low Gravity: Jumps go higher, falls take longer, and slams come from much further up.

• High Instability: Every hit sends bots further than it has any right to.

• Clone Surge: Every bot gets a fake copy of itself. Hitting a fake pays nothing, and they all look like the one you wanted.

• Energy Overload: Abilities recharge five times faster. Nobody uses this responsibly.

Most party games stop at four or eight players, so a group of six splits up and two people watch. Every match here seats sixteen, which means the whole Discord gets in at once and nobody waits on the bench for the next game.

Sixteen bots on one rooftop is a different game from four. There are more people to hit, more people to hit you, and at any given moment somebody is airborne who did not plan to be. Matches run on deterministic rollback netcode, the kind fighting games use, so a sixteen-bot pileup plays out the same on every screen in it.

Invite your Steam friends to a party and queue into an online lobby together, or start a private match that is your party and nobody else.

Mix and match bot bodies, hover thrusters, finishes and colors until your robot looks like nothing else in the lobby. Collect rare cosmetics, open crates, and pick a color scheme so loud that being eliminated first still counts as a personality. Most cosmetics are never behind a paywall: crates and keys both drop from just playing, daily, for everyone.

Every hit, jump, dash, slam and meter traveled is tracked. Matches end with personal accolades (Speed Demon, Ground Pounder, Sky King, Comeback Kid), and the game quietly works out who your rival is based on how often the two of you keep crashing into each other.

All of it adds up to an overall rank on the global Steam leaderboards, next to eleven boards for the individual stats. Check where you stand against the world, your country or just your friends, and how far it is to the next name up. You start near the bottom. Every match moves you.

Full controller support (Xbox, DualShock, DualSense). A finished game at launch, not Early Access.

Grab some friends. Bring sixteen.