Robo Raid

Robo Raid is a free run and gun game you can play online in your browser, a side-scrolling robot shooter in the spirit of the classic arcade platform shooters. Your raider in the orange jumpsuit charges through a robot factory from left to right: run, jump across gaps and up steps, and keep your blaster firing at everything with a red visor. Nothing here is human and nothing bleeds: destroyed robots burst into a shower of nuts, bolts and sparks. It is one of our action games and shooting games, and with all the gap jumps and platforms it belongs with our jumping games too.

The robots fight back in different ways. Walkers stomp toward you and hurt on contact, gunners crouch behind a riot shield that stops your shots, then stand up to fire a volley, drones hover overhead and drop bolts, and turrets on the ground and under the gantries glow red a moment before they shoot. Every bolt is slow enough to jump over if you watch for it. Your shots aim themselves at the nearest robot in front of you, so the skill is in moving, jumping and timing. Weapon capsules give you a spread gun that fans three shots, rapid fire, or a grenade launcher that lobs its shells in an arc onto whatever you aim at, high enough to reach drones and the turrets on the ceiling, with a blast that hits every robot nearby. Health capsules refill your energy, and you have five energy cells and three lives.

Press Play and the campaign begins: three stages played straight through as one run, with one score. Scrap Yard teaches the basics and ends with the Scrap Crusher, a bulldozer tank that charges across its arena. Foundry adds turrets, drones and catwalks, and ends with the hovering Foundry Hammer and its bombs. Core Tower throws everything at you at once, then the Core Titan, whose stomps send shock waves along the floor. When you beat a boss, run through the exit door and the next stage begins at once, with your score, lives, energy and gun carried along. When a boss winds up a charge, a red warning lights up the lane it will ram along: jump up onto a catwalk and it thunders past underneath you. Then there is the Endless Raid: procedurally built rooms that get tougher every few rooms, with a Sentinel mini boss in every sixth room, until your last life is gone.

Robots score points, and kills in quick succession build a combo of up to double points. Every stage you clear adds a bonus, and finishing the campaign adds points for the time left on its clock and for every life you still have, so a clean, fast run scores best. Every ranked run is verified by replaying your inputs, and the campaign has both a top score board and a fastest clear board, which makes it a proper speedrun game. The Endless Raid has its own leaderboard for the longest, highest scoring runs.

Robo Raid plays in landscape on mobile and on PC. On a phone or tablet it draws big on-screen buttons for two thumbs: a move pad on the left, FIRE and JUMP on the right, and a thumb resting between FIRE and JUMP presses both. On a computer use the arrow keys or A and D to run, W, Up or Space to jump and J to fire, or hold the left mouse button to aim your shots at the cursor; P pauses. Nothing to download or install, like all our free online games with no download; fans of retro games and keyboard games should feel right at home.