NOTHING GETS HURT — THINGS FALL APART
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ROBOTS KNOCKED OVER
| BOP beats WALLOP | A tap cancels the big wind-up, and every drop of ATP they put into it is wasted. |
| WALLOP beats BLOCK | It smashes straight through a guard. Nothing else does. |
| BLOCK beats BOP | And it beats WHACK too. Both of them just ping off. |
And the fourth corner: WHACK punishes doing nothing at all. It is how you actually win against somebody who is not blocking.
One bar pays for everything — walking, blocking and winding a punch up. Knock three parts off the other machine and it is a pile of bolts.
You get one bar, and it pays for everything. It is called ATP because that really is the stuff your cells run on — the energy molecule from biology.
It fills back up while you are just standing or walking. Winding a punch up drains it while you hold — the longer you hold, the more it eats and the bigger the punch. Blocking drains it too, and it does not refill while your guard is up. An empty bar means all you can do is run away.
One bar doing three jobs is the whole game: you cannot hide behind a guard and charge a big one.
BOP — tap. Instant, cheap, and it knocks nothing off. Its job is cancelling the other machine's wind-up. Useless against a guard.
WHACK — short hold. Knocks a part off. This is the one you win with. A guard stops it.
WALLOP — hold until the bar is empty. Knocks a part off, goes through a guard, reaches furthest and gives a big shove. It costs everything and roots you to the spot for over a second, which is a very long time with junk falling.
While you hold, the two notches under your ATP are where the punch turns into a WHACK and then a WALLOP, and a line on the mat shows how far it will reach. Dashed and faint means you are too far away; when the line goes solid and glows, let go and it lands.
One big hit knocks a part off. Three parts and you are a pile of bolts. There is no health bar — the parts are the health, and you can see them bolted to the machine.
Punches you block. Junk you dodge. Blocking does nothing at all against anything falling from the roof, so standing there with your guard up gets you flattened by a cannonball.
No parts left is not the end. The machine drops to its knees and the winner gets 8 seconds to land one full WALLOP — while junk keeps falling and the flattened machine crawls out of the way. Run out of time and it pops back up with one part and the fight is on again, which can lose you a fight you had already won.
Beat a robot and a fresh one rolls in, a bit faster and a bit smarter. Every robot you knock over gives you one spare part back, up to four. Keep going until you are a pile of bolts. Your score is how many robots you knocked over.
There is no halfway line, so you can chase somebody all the way into their own corner and pin them there. What you cannot do is walk through them, so nobody ever ends up behind anybody and LEFT and RIGHT mean the same thing to both of you all fight long — which matters when you are sharing one keyboard.
| Move | Block | Punch | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Player 1 | A and D | W | S — hold to wind up |
| Player 2 | ← and → | ↑ | ↓ — hold to wind up |
On a phone or tablet, start your drag on your own side of the screen — that is how the game works out whose thumb is whose — and then drag wherever you want to walk, right across the ring if you like. Hold PUNCH and BLOCK in your corner.
Want to build your own arena? Open arenas.js. Want to change how hard a punch hits or how fast a machine walks? Open settings.js.