Playniac insists Insane Robots is not a card game. It's a card battler, meaning its cards are just weapons and strategic tools, not items to be collected. It doesn't have "costly expansions or time-consuming customization," the studio says. You pick a robot, build a deck that matches their abilities, and get right down to throwing rectangles at each other like the robot god intended. Not only that, it evolved from a prototype of a board game, so genetically it's probably closer to a deck builder like Dominion than a CCG like Hearthstone.
Insane Robots features multiplayer battles and leaderboards, but it also sports a full-fat single-player campaign. You play as a robot vigilante leading a rebellion in a dystopian machine society. You can choose from 46 playable robots, whose play styles can be further customized with over 100 abilities called augments. No matter who you choose, you'll be fighting countless enemy robots in randomly generated arenas, upgrading your deck as you progress. Playniac says the flow of Insane Robot's campaign will feel familiar to fans of roguelikes, especially FTL. (It's also quite similar to Slay the Spire which, funnily enough, just added its third playable character: a robot.)
If the card battles are the meat of the game, then the arenas are the potatoes. They play out as grid-based mini-strategy games with environmental hazards and branching story events. In other words, the decisions you make in arenas will affect your standing in battles, so you're not just moving around.
Insane Robots is scheduled to release on July 12.
