RoboCo
Review

RoboCo (2022) is a creative physics-based robot-building game where you design and code robots to perform challenging tasks. With the multitude of parts and templates to build from, there are countless ways to approach each situation, be it by creating an eight-legged walker or a wheeled vehicle. It offers a great first step into both simple and more advanced coding through an in-game coding system and the more advanced Python language, all permeated with wacky charm and light hearted humour.

Set in the distant future, you construct robots to help the humans perform their day-to-day activities like getting a sandwich or whacking a piñata. In each challenge, you can use as many parts (gears, treads, beams and so on) as you need to build the structure of the robot before using either the simple in-game coding language or Python to control it. You can also decorate it with a slew of items, like googly eyes and top hats, and can digitally paint each piece to make it unique.

There's a lot of trial and error, sometimes hilariously so, before you finally succeed. But learning how to overcome the obstacles you face is all part of the challenge. You can share your creations with others online and can use other people's constructions as templates for your own designs, exploring and expanding upon ideas that you wouldn't have come up with alone.

The result is a game that offers a novel way to engage with both the fundamentals and more advanced side of coding as you make unique creations and engage in silly, lighthearted challenges that reward ambition and experimentation and foster a creative environment where failure is part of the learning process.

Our examiner, Ben Kendall, first checked RoboCo 12 months ago. It was re-examined by Andy Robertson and updated 7 weeks ago.