Last updated on January 21st, 2026 at 01:50 pm
Cargo-Bot – Puzzle Game Review
Cargo-Bot is a Puzzle game from Two Lives Left, first launched in 23rd April 2012.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 27+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Cargo-Bot Stand Out
Over one million people have enjoyed Cargo-Bot! The puzzle game that challenges your brain and helps you learn programming concepts.
Cargo-Bot is the first game programmed entirely on iPad® using Codea
It's a puzzle game where you teach a robot how to move crates. Sounds simple, right? Try it out!
• Beautiful graphics
• Fiendish puzzles
• A game about programming, programmed entirely on iPad
• Record your solutions and share them on YouTube
• Learn more about how it was made by searching for Codea on the App Store
This Puzzle game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Cargo-Bot is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 28th March 2022
Recent improvements include:
• Fixes a few bugs where scores were shown with a decimal place
• Updates a few graphics here and there
Download & Availability
Cargo-Bot is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Requirements: Requires iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 / iPad Mini 3 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 4 / iPad Mini 4 (Cellular) or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
We AM RATING THE ONE STAR FOR SO MUCH BUGS.
This game teaches programming concepts, but also rely on bad programming practices, like programs that's inefficient, hard to understand, and don't terminate properly. It's a game so that's ok. We're skeptical this is suitable for 9 to 11 year olds. Unless they are programming god, they would probably find this a difficult game. We've been playing for months and still haven't achieved all 3 blinking stars. We hope the developer continues to improve this game or make a sequel. L will gladly pay for it.
Once you get cargo bot you wont be able to delete it, so dont waste your time trying to get it and we give it 1 star for a very good reason if you bought it and you cant delete it then dont do it again.
Can you please bring back crabitron it was so fun!! We just want to buy it and play it again.
Come together 2 hard mode crashes when we complete it in 8 step… Wants you to stack 7 blocks but stashes when you do.
We love this app and we are a app-picky person. When we played this we could not stop. Awesome app :).
We loved this game. It was an awesome challenge. We have finished the game and we wish that there were just a few more levels, but that is not the main issue. We wish that the tutoriol helped teache more, and also the hints helped. But over all this game was great.
This is the best game around. You'll finally be challenged and you'll have to think. Takes serious smarts. Was a challenge to us and we have a BA in mathematics.
The point of the game is to come up with the most optimal solution when programming the bot. We spent an hour trying to find a shorter set of instructions for one level before giving up, with three stars, and moving on. Sure, the programmer could have designed this game to reward you for the least number of crane moves, but that would just be a different game. The challenge of making a short program can sometimes be quite the challenge indeed.
Have had great success with this app for students in 2nd-6th grade. They find it fun and challenging. Always great when they try to beat their own scores. Fabulous resource as an intro-intermediate game for coding.
Great game to introduce programming concepts. Both fun and challenging. Can get a solution for almost all puzzles, but the fun is in going for a 3 star solution. Very nicely done.
A great puzzle game. Forces us to think out of the box and innovative. Even regular programming logics sometimes doesn't work. Spend countless hours playing. Really like it.
This game is extremely challenging while still being fun…keeps you busy for a while.
Awesome game!!!!!!!! This is a hidden gem.
Very good app, we were searching for an app like that for a while. Thank you :).
Glad we found it, and it led us to find Codea, too. We love the game. A few suggestions – (1) more easy / intermediate levels would be helpful; (2) an "undo" button would be nice, for when you accidentally drop one instruction on top of another; (3) a level creator or sandbox mode would be very helpful for testing code.
Good for teaching basic programming skills … And fun too.
We never learned code, but this game gave us inspiration! It's a great game full of challenges and joys! Thank you.
You will need to do this to do codea.
Our personal favorite game. Nice concept and beneficial in the same time.
Give Cargo-Bot a spin if you're interested in some wicked brain gymnastics. The puzzles are diabolical, but the feeling of satisfaction derived from whipping up a working solution is second to none. Great app — very educational too.
This is one of the coolest games ever.
If you write code for a living (or as a hobby), you need to get this game. It's fun and very challenging coming up with solutions that fit in the amount of space given. Also, it shows off the awesome power of Codea (which we highly recommend) for writing iPad games on the iPad. Our advice: ignore the one/two/three stars that it grades you for your solutions on each level — just solving the levels at all is hard enough.
This is an app made on the iPad for the iPad. It's also a educational. Got our four year old to write out the solutions for the first tutorial levels. We think it is fantastic but definitely very hard. We would agree the learn curve should be a bit more gentle. But this is simply amazing. Apple should be promoting this.
We love this game and as a Software Engineer we are excited to see a cool application of teaching software. We would add the one thing that would be great would be the addition of multiple players. By this we mean that our son and two daughters play as well as we do. It would be great if we each had our own save file that way no one would see someone else's solution to a level they hadn't played but others had. Again, great and fun game.
This game is really a breath of fresh air. Impressive how it was built on an iPad too.
This is exactly the kind of game we've been looking for. Our only suggestion is that there be more teaching of patterns and whatnot that can be built upon in later levels. We'd appreciate the hints to be more helpful as well.
So much fun and educational too.
This game is really well done and challenging to get 3 stars. We think it's a great tool for teaching programming logic for both kids and adults. We're a programmer and still had to think pretty hard to solve these puzzles.
We've been developing software for 30 years and this is by far the best game we've come across in our field. It is based on the flash game LightBot but is much better.
Most games on iOS are relatively mindless, but this game constantly makes you think. It's exactly what we need more of.
Really good. It teaches the thought process that underlies all computer programming. Our only quibble is that it only grades solutions only on brevity of the code. Sometimes the briefest code makes the crane do much more work than it should. Any human in the factory observing the crane's behavior would think the program was not very good. That said, most of the puzzles as puzzles do work best with that one criterion, but we think some good puzzles could made that take into account the execution time and not just the code size. Code-size problems can result in solutions that are brittle and depend very much on the exact starting conditions. They also can be hard to understand, as they rely on complex "fall through" behavior. So in a way this is a throwback to an earlier era when space was at a tremendous premium, and shaving off a few instructions was important. But it also gave us the Y2K problem, in which years were represented by two digits, which solved the problem right up until the year 2000, when that assumption was suddenly no longer valid. But still, we highly recommend this app. If you or your child have a bright and inquisitive mind this is not only fun but educational in a real and practical way that few games or puzzles can be.
Fun, captivating, intellectual, brilliant! More puzzles & functionality please! Would be nice to rely less on recursive functions since these are considered bad practice in modern programming, and to give credit not only for code length but to speed and elegance. But nonetheless, a completely addicting and fantastic game.
Truly enjoying this app but … Agree with most … There are very few intermediate levels. Also find that the hints use terminology that doesn't seem to be defined anywhere. Needs a glossary? Define what a register is, what is F1, etc.
We are finding this game challenging and fun! We shared with our 11 yr old nephew and he loved it! Dove right in….. Think it will be a very cool tool to introduce programming ideas in a fun way at school.
We really like how it teaches kids how to program.
We got this game, on the recommendation of a friend, as a way to teach our kids some basics of programming. It was a great suggestion! The kids (5 and 9) love it! (And we have to admit, we think it's pretty fun, too.) They can usually figure out a solution, so there is some immediate reward, but it takes some real thinking to get the shortest solution. Best part, we found a solution to one level that is 2-moves shorter than the shortest known. :-).
For the love of god make an option to disable the terrible music.
As others have said, it needs a lot more easier levels that more gradually introduce concepts and structured thinking. Jumps from easy to loops and recursion procedures, and conditionals at tutorial level problem 4! Great potential there as a learning tool.
This is a nice game that makes us think. Unfortunately, we are colorblind, and you are using green and yellow (indistinguishable for us). Change the color to black or white or add a color-blind setting.
We admit we are struggling to get even one star solutions to some screens but we love this game. The program might benefit from a little bit more of an explanation of the theory of programming steps. This is hard.
We're a programmer, but what they consider the best score is not what we would consider the best score. For instance, we just did one puzzle and although we did it with 4 registers and it did solve it and that is the shortest solution for that puzzle in terms of instructions, it was not solved efficiently. The claw made many unnecessary movements that would be undesirable in the real world. Also, navigation could be improved and it would be nice if you could reset the tutorial from the beginning so that a new user could go through it. We did find ways to sometimes do that, but it was awkward. Overall, we find this game fun and instructive and would recommend it.
We've really enjoyed playing this game so far, except there is not enough explanations to how the scoring works – and that is very frustrating. What are "registers", and why did we only get one star? A short terminology list would be nice, the hints are not helpful when you don't know what he words in the hints mean. We even went through the "tutorial" twice, thinking we missed that.
This kept tripping us up! We wanted to make our programs the fastest and most elegant, but cargo-bot just wants you to use the least amount of spaces – even if it results in unnecessary moves.
We think this is a good app for someone to get the basics…but it advances rapidly without multiple hints or some kind of greater assistance when needed.
We really enjoy this app but we do agree that levels go from easy to hard in one step. We do wish there were easier stages to get the basic idea down and also more useful hints. Other than that, great job! We really have enjoyed this game.
This was a lot of fun to play and program, but some of the puzzles were too far of a jump from previous puzzles. It'd be great to have more intermediate puzzles to prep for the concepts in the more advanced ones.
We must agree and repeat the same words as others over & over (as in the game)! We have 3 older kids that love puzzle games, but this one is too hard for them. With a Computer a Science masters degree, we can still spend hours on many puzzles. Saving multiple solutions, version control of unsolved puzzles, & saving off a set of instructions for reuse (building libraries of moves that are easy to reference in other puzzles) are 2 big needs! Settings to disable the sounds/music while letting background music play is also a must while playing for hours. Those changes would make this much more enjoyable! Then a button to simply change the "best solution" criteria would make this several games in one. Shortest moves would be nice, but we've found that shortest moves is nearly equivalent to shortest time to solve and may be easier! Also, updating the game or downloading "content" updates when new solutions are found would be nice. We'd also love to see an option in Settings to include a link to the video with the best solution displayed.
This game is good as a puzzle game. But branding it as " helps you learn programming" is very misleading. If a programmer naturally gets 3 stars for this game, he/she would be a horrible coder in real life. The objective in this game is sort of writing the shortest program. But for that purpose, it ignores time complexity as well as discourages modulization of functions (you'd better do everything in line one to save cubes used). It is just bad as a programming training.
We've been a computer programmer for 30 years. This is not "programming" in the sense of computer programming. This is more of a puzzle game, where you organize instructions for a robot to complete a task. So, for example, we know what we want the robot to do but the biggest challenge is figuring out HOW to use the limited instructions to get the robot to DO what you want it to do. Computer programming is much more flexible and much less puzzlish.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 1.3
- Size: 17.98 MB
- iOS: 12.4 or later
- Languages: EN
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: Two Lives Left
Last updated: 28th March 2022 | Genre: Puzzle | Developer: Two Lives Left