Insane Robots: 6 Tips for Beginners

These tips will compute

As you begin your personal robotic revolution in Playniac’s card battle game Insane Robots, there are a few things to remember – not least of which is that those arenas are a dangerous place. But fear not! Well, not that you can – you’re an insane robot now. But don’t try to simulate fear either(!) because we’ve gone and laid out the top tips for beginners hoping to make their way to the winner’s podium of The Arenas. So, have a scan through our tips, download the information you need, and patch them into your own playstyle… we’ll stop with the computer talk now.

1) Making Sense of Everything

When you get into your first card battle you might have a few questions, at the top of that list could be ‘what the hell is going on!?’ So let’s start with a rundown of what is going on.

1 – This is your boost unit, where you can use specific tokens to give yourself extra defences or attacks.

2 – This is your defence circuit, you’ll need to fill both slots with defence cards to, well, have a defence against attacks.

3 – This is your attack circuit, same deal as the defence circuit but you’ll use the red tokens to fill it up.

4 – This is your HP, if you get attacked, your opponent will have to break through your defence before any HP gets taken away.

5 – These are the bonuses you have equipped. Each character has a different starter bonus, and you can buy an equip others as you play.

6 – These are your energy units which show how many moves you can make during your turn. The majority of moves only take one unit of energy, but some cost two units.

7 – These are the cards you have in your deck. Every fight has a random selection of cards instead of you having to build decks, and each turn you’ll get another card automatically and you can use energy points to receive new cards as well.

The mechanics of each fight are really simple. Basically, you need to fill both slots on your attack and defence. Your attack score has to be higher than your opponent’s defence score so that your attack is successful. And after that, it’s just a matter of getting their HP down to zero – see, simple.

2) Travelling through the map

Right, we’ll get through this one nice and quick because the chances are you already know how the game works. Insane Robots will have you fighting through different arena maps as you have a number of fellow malfunctioning robots to fight it out with. Moving through the map itself is just a point and click deal, with some environments affecting how far you can move.

To start a battle, simply move your character next to another robot and press on the enemy. If you’re able to start a fight during your turn, you’ll get a “turn bonus” that will treat you to extra points on some cards during your fight.

Similarly, some environments will give you different bonuses. Look out for tiles with mountains on them which also give you a bonus – because having the higher ground is always better… Anakin.

3) Understanding Overkills

Because just winning a match isn’t good enough, Insane Robots lets you rub your victory in that little bit extra using the overkill feature. But this style of win is far more than just showboating, it’s also a way of making some easy extra money.

The overkill kicks in when your attack takes the opponent’s HP into minus figures, with each overkill hit netting you 100 moneys (hooray!) So, if you’re strapped for cash and you want to earn some easy money, aiming for overkills in each match are the best way to go about doing it.

4) Glitches, Swaps, Locks, and Hacks

Along with your attack and defence cards, you’ll see a selection of pink cards as well. These little treats are your tactical cards, helping to give yourself a boost when needed or to sucker punch whichever tin can you’re fighting against.

In order: Hacks, Glitches, Swaps, and Locks

Hacks: These are just stronger glitches; instead of increasing or decreasing a card’s value at random, hack cards will maximise an individual card for you or drain an enemy’s of everything.

Glitches: You can use this on your own cards or on an opponent. They can either increase or decrease the value of cards on the playing board (so, if a card only had a strength of two, using a glitch could increase it to five or decrease it to one). Our tip is to use them on your lower strength cards or an opponent’s higher strength cards.

Swap: You can use these cards to do a straight swap of an attack or defence card you and an opponent have – very useful if they’ve got a higher score than you.

Locks: These cards can help you protect your high-value cards from being glitched or swapped – very handy when you’ve wrangled yourself a strong setup. You can also use the lock cards to unlock an opponent’s card, allowing you to follow up with a glitch, swap, or hack afterwards.

5) Combining Cards

If you’ve found that your deck is full of low-level cards or that you have too many glitch cards and no attack cards, then knowing how to combine your cards is a quick way of sorting out your deck.

The game lets you put together any two cards of the same colour, each combination has a different outcome. You can combine cards by dropping one card on top of another of the same colour.

Here’s a list of the most useful combination cards:

Glitch + Lock Card = Attack/Defence card: You can place these in either you attack slot or defence slot, a useful combo if you’re trying to put an attack together.
Attack + Attack = Attack/Defence Card
Defence + Defence = Attack/Defence Card
Glitch + Glitch = Hack Card: A handy combo if you want to weaken your opponent’s offence or leave them open to an attack
Swap + Glitch = Attack/Defence Card
Lock Card + Swap Card = Energy Unit Card: you can use this to give yourself one or two extra moves during a round – easily one of the most useful cards when you’re in a tight battle.

These aren’t a complete list of combos, but they’re certainly the ones you’ll want to memorise and learn how to use effectively.

6) Equipping Augments

To give yourself a fighting chance in the later tournaments, you’ll need a helping hand in the shape of the augments you can buy and equip at shops throughout each map. To get to the shops you just have to spot one on the map and land on it.

All the shops sell the same gear from what we’ve seen, but spending some money on extra augment slots is a must in our opinion. Once you’ve bought some extra slots and some augments, slide over to the “Equip” section, which is next to the sell tab.

The equip section is broken into two halves: battle augs and map augs. The Map augs will give you extra bonuses when you’re manoeuvring around, whether it’s an extra turn bonus point or augs that allow you to move around certain environments easier.

But the battle half is where you’ll want to invest from the off. As soon as you can, pick up the attack bonus and defence bonus augs; these mods will give you an extra energy bar on each combat card you draw, making it much easier to max out your attack and defence during combat.

There are also augments for extra energy points and the money you earn from each match, so it’s worth playing around with your loadout and changing it around as you need to.