Robot Rivals

Robot Rivals is heavyweight robot combat in your browser. You drive a 113 kg spinner in a steel box full of saws and pulverizers, and you have three minutes to wreck the other robot.

The hits aren't canned. Every weapon is simulated as a flywheel: HEADSTONE's 36 kg bar at 2,500 rpm stores about 90 kJ, and when a tooth bites, that energy goes into whatever it hit. So you wait for the needle to reach the red, then drive in fast. Get it wrong and you'll see it on your own robot: dents, peeling paint, armor plates and wheels flying off, and eventually a weapon belt that gives up.

Four robots, and one you only meet as a boss

• HEADSTONE: horizontal bar, 2,500 rpm. The hardest hitter in the box, and the slowest to spin up
• CHECKMATE: vertical bar, 3,800 rpm. Uppercuts that send you into the roof
• SON OF TORQUE: a spinning three-arm shell, low and wide. The hardest of the four to flip clean over, but touch that shell wrong and it goes ballistic
• TAURUS: a 5,000 rpm drum on four-wheel drive, the quickest of the four to spin up. Just don't get flipped
• THE JACK: a pneumatic flipper that throws robots two metres up. Not yours to drive: he waits at round 10 of the Gauntlet

Modes

• Championship: live ranked fights against real players. Climb from Bronze to Champion; the top 3 of every week and month win a medal
• Quick Fight: one room for everything. PLAY NOW drops you in with whoever is waiting, or fill the pedestals yourself: up to four robots online, CPUs on any level, and a friend on the couch who presses right Shift to join
• Gauntlet: one armor bar, opponent after opponent, a pit stop card after every win and a boss every fifth round. Your best run of the week goes on the board
• Hazard Havoc: 90 seconds with the hazards on overdrive, scored and ranked
• Daily Challenge: the same matchup and twist for everyone, every day. Share your result and brag

Something to play for

Daily and weekly missions, 18 records (16 without the server), and robots, variants (Heavy Weapon, Sprinter, Tank) and paint jobs you unlock by playing. Every knockout can be saved as a slow-motion video to share. No sign-up, and nothing to buy.

Controls

• W / S drive · A / D steer · Space weapon on/off · C camera · Esc pause · M sound
• Gamepad: left stick drive · RB weapon on/off (RT to hold) · Y camera · Start pause
• Two players on one PC: player 2 joins the Quick Fight room with right Shift, or A on their own controller. Red drives WASD + Space, blue the arrows + right Shift, and the screen splits

Best in Chrome or Edge on a computer. On a slow machine the game drops to low quality by itself. On a phone it runs with touch controls, but it's made for a keyboard or gamepad: if you found it on your phone, open it again on a laptop.

Opening Nights: Friday 25 September, 23:00 CEST (17:00 New York, 22:00 UK), and Saturday 26 September, 20:00 CEST (14:00 New York, 19:00 UK). Everyone queues at the same time, so ranked fights start in seconds.

Find an opponent, share a clip or report a bug on the Discord: discord.gg/HkPkbBNKVM

Made with three.js and Rapier, and a lot of help from AI tools. Designed, tuned and playtested by Alex (hakman-dev).

Hit sounds: metal foley by Nox_Sound and falling debris by xkeril (freesound.org), impact sounds and the announcer by Kenney (kenney.nl), all CC0. Thanks!

Privacy: the Championship server stores an anonymous id, the driver name you pick, your fight results, and when your account was made and last used. Network addresses are only kept in memory, for at most an hour. Want your account removed? Ask in the comments with your driver name.

Inspired by BattleBots. Not affiliated with or endorsed by BattleBots.