ranzware
Lately, I’ve started rewatching old terrestrial TV shows at times of particularly high stress or workload, when my brain is simply too frazzled to risk being disappointed by something new. Last year it was the archaeology show Time Team. This year it’s Robot Wars, the competitive robot battling show that ran on the BBC and, later, Channel 5 from 1998 to 2004.
If you’ve not had the pleasure of watching Robot Wars, because you were too young or lived outside of the UK (you may be familiar with its American equivalent Battlebots) it’s a tournament-based affair where amateur engineers build their own robots weaponised with axes, crushers, flywheels, and flipping mechanisms, then pitch them against each other in remote-controlled bouts of mechanical mayhem. Alongside the competing bots, the arena is patrolled by bigger ‘House Robots’ with names like Sir Killalot, Sergeant Bash, and my personal favourite, Dead Metal, a gunmetal lobster that clutches robots with hydraulic claws and then shreds them with a retracting circular sawblade.
Robot Wars brings together a lot of my favourite things, like nerdy chat about machines, wanton destruction, and Craig Charles—the relentlessly enthusiastic host for most of the original series’ run. As a kid, I always wanted to give it a go myself, to build my own robot and enter the fray, and rewatching the series brought back those same desires. Unfortunately, now as then, I have all the engineering skill of a medieval peasant. But where reality denies, videogames can often provide, which is how I embarked upon a quest to find a great robot fighting game.
I figured the best place to start was the most obvious, the official tie-in Robot Wars: Arenas of Destruction released in 2001. This isn’t readily available nowadays, but it wasn’t difficult to acquire a copy from a certain purveyor of abandoned wares. It turns out Arena of Destruction is a surprisingly involved affair, letting you build your own robot from different chassis’, batteries, drives, weapons etc, and compete in various kinds of tournaments and individual fights. It also has lots of official gubbins in it, including the TV show’s CGI introduction, and some decent models of the house robots for a game made so close to the Millennium.
Unfortunately, it’s also naff. The destruction isn’t bad for the time with robots dynamically shredding their armour as they fight. But the physics are absolutely shocking, the weapons have no sense of impact, the menu for building robots is confusing to the point where I suspect it might be broken, and the game plays the same piercing audience-cheering sound effect every five seconds. It didn’t help that the repository for forsaken entertainment products I used only had the US version of the game, which replaces the British version’s exuberant commentator Jonathan Pearce with some identikit American pundit who could’ve come out of a can.
In all, Arenas of Destruction was a disappointment. Undeterred, however, I took a punt and searched for ‘Robot Wars’ on Steam. Immediately, a game came up named exactly that, despite having seemingly nothing whatsoever to do with the TV show. Nonetheless, it was released in 2024, and looked pretty shiny in the screenshots. Could I have struck gold?
For about five minutes, I thought I might have. Robot Wars only lets you select from a small number of robots and has just one fighting arena. But the moment my spinning sawblade monstrosity collided with the AI’s flywheel contraption, the two bots sprang to either end of the arena in a shower of sparks. More than that, the impact triggered a delicious slow-motion camera depicting the collision in all its gnarly detail.
“Hahaha, yes, YES!” I squealed, my face pressed up against Robot Wars’ window. Unfortunately, the moment I tried to move my robot again, it drove straight through the arena floor.
If Arenas of Destruction whiffed of being broken, Robot Wars is unambiguously busted. In another fight, my robot stopped working after the first impact. This is something that does happen in actual Robot Wars. But said robot remained nonfunctional after I had quit the match and restarted several times. Moreover, while the impacts between robots were decent, Robot Wars features little in the way of visible damage indicators. Besides, the whole package is far too barebones to recommend anyway.
Beaten by reality a second time, I returned to the pit for a rethink. I considered Besiege, an excellent game about building medieval siege contraptions that function similarly to robots. While it’s probably the closest you can get to a Robot Wars experience while maintaining some level of quality, it just doesn’t have the right tone. Another, longer search on Steam brought up a game called Robot Arena 3, released in 2016. Yet it has a ‘Mostly Negative’ rating, with many of the reviews stating it is unfinished, and not a patch on Robot Arena 2…
Hold on a minute.
Robot Arena 2, unfortunately, isn’t on Steam. But as with the official Robot Wars game, it isn’t hard to find elsewhere. Although visibly aged and structurally simple, it soon proved a superior experience to either Arenas of Destruction or Robot Wars. The robots have authentic weight and momentum as they move around, and the weapons have pleasing tangibility, even if the destruction is a little simplistic. Sadly, the robust robot simulation is spoiled by utterly dreadful camera control, which seems incapable of keeping your robots in view. Even if you control the camera manually with the mouse, the inertia is so great that you simply can’t keep track of the action.
At this point, I reckoned I’d done as well as I could. But there was one last ray of hope. Robot Arena 2 has a small but highly dedicated modding community, and like any modding community, it loves to recreate cultural touchstones. I’d already spotted individual Robot Wars bots built with the game’s robot construction toolset knocking around the gametechmods forums, and I was sniffing around for more with the intent of assembling my own Robot Wars scenario, when I stumbled upon the Robot Wars 2004 mod.
For all intents and purposes, this is an unofficial Robot Wars game. Not only does it include a ton of recreated Robot Wars bots like Razer, Firestorm, Chaos 2, Behemoth and Pussycat, it also has recreations of different arenas from various eras of the show (including the 2016 reboot hosted by Dara O’ Briain). It even features voice lines taken from the show, including some pre-match preamble by Jonathan Pearce, and the ‘3…2…1…ACTIVATE’ countdown to a fight.
It’s comfortably the most authentic Robot Wars experience of the bunch. The robot recreations are extremely well done. Behemoth feels exactly like the miniature bulldozer it is, Pussycat is a barely controllable threshing machine precisely as you’d expect. Chaos 2’s flipper is as lethal as it is easy to underestimate. As for whether the mod is good, it’s certainly better than the official Robot Wars game, but Robot Arena 2’s wayward camera inevitably undermines the action. I did manage to eliminate Chaos 2 while controlling Razer, though, virtually realising a dream I’ve had since I was 12 years old.
Ultimately though, none of these games include what I enjoy most about Robot Wars today—the people who partake in it. Behind the emphasis on destruction and the (very light) presentational posturing, there’s a fundamental streak of decency among the Robot Wars community. No amount of provocation from presenters or producers can prevent the irrepressible sportsmanship among the roboteers from showing, and there’s a real family atmosphere to the pit, not least because many of the competitors bring their actual families to the show.
Most of all, they’re all proper, old-fashioned nerds. Shy, thoughtful, beardy types who are generally more interested in the craft of their robots than winning anything. They’re graceful in defeat, awkward in victory, and always happy to lend a motor to a fellow roboteer in distress. I’m sure this kind of nerd, whose power and influence are limited entirely to their shed, still exists. But I miss the days when this was the defining image of geekery, rather than a multi-bulti billionaire whose overexposure to the Internet and unlimited access to venture capital led them to abandon their humanity.
I suppose what I’m truly yearning for is not a Robot Wars battle simulation, but a Robot Wars life simulation, a variant of the Sims where you manage the arena and the pit behind it, replacing the carpet swatches and nonsensical Simlish with circuit-boards and engineering jargon. And while it would naturally have a Craig Charles voiceover and a fully simulated robot destruction system, the ultimate goal of the game would be that everybody has a good time. I reckon the chances of my finding that on Steam are somewhere between zero and none. But it’s a big old world, and maybe, just maybe, there’s an indie game developer somewhere who is as obsessed with Robot Wars as I am.
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Kurt Indovina
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