YMMV / Robot Arena

• Cult Classic: There is a small but dedicated group of people who, as of 2023, still regularly play Robot Arena 2 (almost exclusively with the DSL mod), hosting tournaments and developing new mods for it.
• Game-Breaker: The components available, especially the weapons, are very unbalanced.
  • In RA1, the radio jammer. It's a component that completely immobilizes your opponent for a few seconds. The high battery drain doesn't balance it at all.
  • In RA2, a motor on top of another motor lets you reach absurd weapon speeds, allowing spinners to deal utterly game-breaking damage, while a 7kg razor tip is just as durable and more damaging than a 30kg sledgehammer.
  • In RA3, ram plates (which in RA2 were just simple armor plates) deal more damage per hit than any other component, which makes no sense at all but also makes them a total game-breaker since they're tough and highly damaging. Naturally, Emergency has four of them.
• Goddamned Bats: In RA2, Lil'Dog is this due to being very fast and nimble, and EMERGENCY is this due to being fast, durable, and while very underwhelming in damage, it keeps flipping you to sheer annoyance. While both robots returned in the third game, Lil'Dog was reduced to a borderline Joke Character, while Emergency crossed into That One Boss territory.
• Good Bad Bugs: A few of the second game's physics quirks ended up becoming vital parts of the metagame.
  • Attach a Small Wedge component to a burst motor, using an extender, and position it so the tip of the wedge is in front of your robot and just below the wheelbase. The resulting "burst wedge" has a zero ground clearance and can get in underneath anything that isn't another burst wedge, letting you control the fight. The AI bot Emergency uses this same tactic.
  • Your robot's spinner not fast enough? Attach a second spin motor to the first one, and get double the speed.
  • Some components, most notably batteries, can be stacked on top of one another if placed with enough precision. And since batteries don't factor into weight distribution for some reason, you can safely stack batteries, shrink your robot down to save weight on armor, and fit more weapons on.
  • The default armor applied to your robot if you don't select any armor type has the weight of aluminium armor, but is stronger than steel. It's pretty much the only armor that any serious machine uses as a result.
  • The Trinity glitch, named after Project Trinity, the first robot to make use of it. By strapping a piston to a spin motor, spinning it up, and firing the piston, you can basically dislocate whatever's on the end of the piston for increased spinner range; with multiple pistons or specific orientations, the physics engine goes completely out the window.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Flippers. Unlike real-life Robot Combat, the Robot Arena games score battles based on damage alone, and flippers have no damage output whatsoever. This railroads them into the game plan of trying to strand opponents on their backs (which only works if the opponent's not invertible and can't self-right) or throw them out of the arena (which isn't possible on some arenas, most notably the Combat Arena, which also happens to be by far the most popular one). Throw in the existence of popups, which are basically the same thing but with actual damage output, and it's not surprising that flippers aren't terribly popular.
• Obvious Beta:
  • Several parts of the second game were severely un-polished upon release, and the game has a wide array of hidden components, robots that look like they do one thing but don't, and unused AI.
    • The best armor in the game is, counter-intuitively, obtained by not selecting armor at all, which gives what the community refers to as "double-strength armor"; needless to say, this was almost certainly an oversight.
    • Components are likewise poorly balanced, resulting in vicious-looking axes and hammer heads being far less effective for their weight than small razor tips and spikes.
  • For the third game:
    • At first, there were no weight limits whatsoever. While weight limits were later added, this created a separate problem where overweight bots could be entered into tournaments, but couldn't compete or be withdrawn, leaving both the bot and the tournament locked forever. Parts were highly unbalanced, with seemingly-arbitrary weight and damage values (and for some reason, wheel casters weigh about 160kg more than their description says they do).
    • Collision detection issues initially meant that wedges and flippers were completely useless. This was fixed and then broken again, so that if you build a ground-scraping wedge chassis, your robot simply won't move.
    • Robots will occasionally just blow up in the Workshop when you try to test them, crashing your game and deleting your creation. Luckily there's a workaround to restore your bot if this happens.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The battery mechanic in RA1. Batteries recharge slowly and drain very quickly, which means that during battle you spend half the time doing nothing but waiting for the batteries to recharge. The second game is far more sensible in regards to batteries.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: RA2 had unofficial "antweight" and "beetleweight" classes: beetleweights can only weigh 175kg, compared to the 250kg lightweight limit, whereas antweights can only 125kg. Needless to say, making a decent antweight is rather difficult. RA3 also had an antweight class, set at 185kg, but it never really took off due to the game's poor reception.
• Shout-Out: The Supervolt battery, available in the second and third games, is a possible reference to the fictional brand depicted in Energizer adverts (in which the Energizers always outperform it). Ironically, it's the longest-lasting battery in RA2 (and consequently, the best), and was also the longest-lasting in RA3 until the addition of the MegaVolt battery.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: Robot Arena 2 was a vast improvement over the original game, with much greater customization, better AI, and actual physics. Sadly inverted with Robot Arena 3.
• The Scrappy: EMERGENCY. It'll annoy the hell out of you when using anything other than a wedge, because all it does is flip you around and stop you doing anything.
• That One Boss:
  • It's generally agreed that Robot Arena 2's stock AI bots are mostly garbage, resulting in many modders attempting to fix the problem and make their designs more competent. That being said, some are genuinely threatening.
    • The ever-infamous EMERGENCY, one of the few competent heavyweight robots. Its flippers allow it to toss you around the arena with impunity, potentially racking up instant losses on arenas with low walls or death pits while preventing you from scoring points, and it's one of the few robots that actually makes good use of the weight limit, making it quite durable as well. In the fanbase, being able to consistently beat EMERGENCY is pretty much what separates a good builder from a bad one.
    • Tornado and Berserker, robots with similar full-body spinner designs, are considered the toughest of their respective weight classes due to their weapons being alarmingly powerful, especially compared to most AI robots. Their destructive power and wide range of attack make them very difficult to approach without being ripped to shreds.
  • Robot Arena 3 has quite a few:
    • Firstly, Emergency again, due to its combination of ram plates and flippers. It'll flip you around the arena while quickly racking up damage points and can knock you out in a matter of moments if you aren't prepared to fight it.
    • Savage, a robot literally covered in weapons, mostly spikes but also front punching arms and a rear disc. It's almost impossible to find an opening to attack it unless you have a flipper.
    • Similarly, OctoDie is a full-body spinner whose whirling blades will deal significant damage any time you try and get close enough to hit it. Again, a flipper is your best hope of beating it, but a low enough weapon positioned far enough from your chassis can also slide under the blades and damage its exposed wheels.
    • Gluttony, a wide robot armed with a grinder as well as two angled ram plates on the sides to funnel you into the grinder's path. Needless to say, it's very hard to get out of its way, and those ram plates are capable of dealing heavy damage before the grinder even hits you.

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