Last updated on December 11th, 2025 at 04:50 am
Gladiabots – Education Game Review
Gladiabots is a Education/Strategy/Simulation game from Sebastien Dubois, first launched in 14th December 2019.
It’s rated 17+ and currently has 88+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Gladiabots Stand Out
Gladiabots is a robot combat strategy game in which you carefully construct the AI of your robot squad and send them into the battle arena. Improve, refine and repeat until you outsmart all your opponents and friends online.
Features:
- Create your own AI and watch your robots execute it in the arena
- Fix it, improve it and repeat it until you outsmart all your opponents
- Simple and powerful AI programming system offering millions of possible combinations (with no programming skills required)
- Create and customize your robot crew
- Single player campaign with hundreds of solo missions
- Online multiplayer career mode featuring, ranked, unranked and private matches
- 3 distinctly different game modes: elimination, domination and collection
- Create and compete in tournaments
- Asynchronous multiplayer – battle friends even if they are not online
- Sandbox mode in which you control both teams to test your tactics
- Rank up and earn points to unlock new robot skins
IMPORTANT NOTE
This game doesn't have any ads and is NOT pay-to-win!
The in-app purchases allow you to buy in-game credits that you can use to unlock new skins for your robots. They are optional, purely cosmetic and don't give any gameplay advantages.
This Education game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Gladiabots is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 14th August 2020
Recent improvements include:
1.4.28
- Multiplayer: fixed matches with deleted players appearing as "to be deployed"
- Multiplayer: reduced leaderboard activity timeout from 1 month to 1 week
- Multiplayer: fixed not downloaded matches appearing with "0" map generation code
- Tournaments: check if registration is enabled on server when using the in-game "register" button
- Team setup: fixed color patterns shaking for certain resolutions
- Tutorial: fixed "A and B" intermediate mission (victory by default)
- Tutorial: unlocked node selection in "Attack" mission to enable node tooltips on mobile
- UI: move bug report button to the settings menu
- Localization: improved AI tooltips for french language
- Localization: fixed typos
- Stats: fixed player daily score and ranking graphs displaying "0" value when player is inactive
Download & Availability
Gladiabots is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
This is a fun game to kill some time with if you need an easy game to burn time away and an even better game if youre looking for a deeper game system.
We like how the robots fight in a battle of who has the best team setup and code.
5 stars all day, no matter the gaming system this might find its way to. Fairly deep and a pretty steep learning curve, but if programming robots and seeing how your plan plays out against others sounds like your cup of tea. This could wind up becoming your next obsession. The amount of actions/moves you can put into place is crazy and watching your team of bots just inch it out past someone elses team is a pure adrenaline booster. Thank you for making this game. Thank you for releasing it in the AppStore. You guys rock. This game rocks. Woooo.
4/5 because Ive only finished the tutorial missions and everything is explained really well and being forced to be hands on by having the player connect tutorial nodes helped with the learning process. The only bit we feel may not be explained well, although it could just be us not getting it, is connectors. Cant wrap our head around em. Update: we realized the developer and we almost have the same name so we updated our review to a 5/5.
Difficult learning curve but its so fun when you get to pvp. For sure a worthy purchase just expect to put some effort in.
Super cool game uhh it has bots you program to fight each other we like it 10/10.
Most programming games just require a few commands to bypass a specific puzzle and move on to the next level. This game has you progressively building an intelligent algorithm and debugging it constantly, watching it evolve and grow smarter with every new tweak. So good.
If you are of a creative mind and love tinkering this game is a great way to spend sometime. The UI is simple and with the tutorial, its easy to get a grip of. Ive been playing the pc version and knew it would be a great fit on touch screen devices.
When we were searching for a Carnage Heart game we came across this little gem. Great game that we recommend to anyone interested in programming battle bots.
Ill leave a proper review later. Im too busy playing.
Super fun, easy to understand but difficult to master love it.
Started playing this on PC. Addicted. Need it on IOS so we can keep playing while away from the PC. Amazing app mirrors PC perfectly. Very fun AI building to accomplish objectives. So far only campaign for us, which is a great learning experience.
This game is fantastic. Its a great way to learn to think like a programmer without having to worry about syntax or constant typing. If you have a competitive streak or just like watching your ideas come to life then this game will inspire you to push yourself, both creatively and analytically. Even if you have no interest in programming, playing this game will teach you problem-solving and how to think more efficiently. And if you ever feel stuck, just check out the Wiki and the forum to learn more about the game, see existing strategies, and discuss ideas with other players.
Loving the game so far but the 30 fps limit gives us a headache even while just navigating in the menu. Please give us an option to toggle between 30 fps and 60 fps.
This is such a fun, stimulating game. The multitude of game modes allow you to choose what your robots will specialize in. It allows us to easily code and have fun. Great work.
Not a typical game for this current era, though it aught to be. Very good tool for improving your critical thinking, deductive reasoning, and instills the basis for learning how to program. Starts with a very simple small set of commands, but rapidly opens up more and more complexity by not only new commands, but building the simple commands into designated sub routines. It might not be for everyone, especially if you like matching colored dots. You just need to try it and youll be hooked, or you wont. At the very least its a one time purchase…no bags of gems or hero shards. In the age of pay 2 win, this is a welcome surprise.
This game really benefits a programming mindset, which isnt a surprise. The difficulty curve is rather steep, but making progress feels very fulfilling.
We used to program in high school and although its a lot simpler it still feels fun to play. It can get annoying at times but thats when you solve a bug and find 20 more. Great job making this game you guys and we hope it gets huge. Might want to lower the price a dollar or two cuz not many people like buying mobile games at that price. Probably the most we've ever seen any creators listen to their community so thanks for listening to us.
This game is extremely well thought out, and the interface is super intuitive. For example we didnt have to play the tutorial to know what the glyphs on the tiles mean. Kudos to the developers for making the ultimate battle robot programming game. As far as programming games go, this is near the top of our list, perhaps only below TIS-100, but that one is not for everyone, if youre old enough to have programmed a 6502 in assembly language then youd enjoy it, otherwise this would be our first pick. If youre wondering if you should risk $7 on this, let us ask you, what was the last thing you spent $7 on? BigMac and Fries? This is a lot better, we guarantee. P.S. If your robot is not moving, it is 99.9% likely it is bug in your code, and not this app, so please dont get your shorts in a bunch! :).
This is a great game where you don't grind pointless missions and where the outcome of competition is directly the result of your 'design'. It is really 'your success or failure', as you are building the logic that gets executed. Satisfying wins, highly replay-able, tons of depth… Great game, buy it.
Most PC ports to iOS have major control issues. This one is very well suited to phones. If youre sick of all the App Store garbage, you wont regret the $7 on this.
Great game on pc, happy to see it ported to iOS! (Issue fixed now) Edit: Unfortunately it does not fully support iPad Pro screen, it has black bars. We hope this can be fixed (maybe by putting a static image on both ends) Edit2: Wow, thank you for the quick update. The dev has released an update addressing the black bars. Thank you.
Likely just learning curve but some basic hand holding, dumbed downed approach for newbies like us needed. Trying to get the jist of this programming a bit daunting and learn the basics of screen controls. Game does look like fun once learned. Still working at it.
Great concept for a game, we used to play another one somewhat similar to this, but this one becomes frustrating as we've had trouble beating half the levels with the basic AI kits that the game gives you, trying to build your own AI can be confusing even with the tutorials, theres alot to put it and consider to actually make a winning team, when we decided to google AIs for help, we found most of them to be over 100 nodes, where as a basic AI is around 10.
We like the concept, program your bots AI to do the task at hand and kill enemy bots. But your code is hella bugged. Ive had an in game generated so plan not work at all, same with ones Ive made, meaning the bot didnt move or didnt switch between parcels. We just did the lvl 5 training in collectors, and all parcels worked but all bots continually got in range of an enemy bot, same enemy, then instead of shooting at it they turned around to go collect a node, which is across the play field. Just doing circles forever.
One of the most innovative programming games Ive come across. Responsive developer and friendly community helping a programing novice like us learn the ropes.
Super fun game. We really like the way multiplayer (both free play and ranked) works. You dont have to wait in a matchmaking queue or anything it just automatically puts you against an AI created by another player at the same skill level and then either player can watch the match whenever they want. Also the way the campaign is designed is awesome. The first chapter (or two?) are designed by the developer but the rest of the chapters use AIs made by real players in the community at various skill levels. So as you rank through the campaign you are sort of playing against the whole spectrum of the community and can learn and get better over time. This also means the campaign can change over time, keeping it fresh and challenging. 11/10.
Ive played a lot of strategy games, but nothing compares to this. The whole mechanic of having to program your robots before they enter the arena is unique. We teach both robotics and coding, and we would love to use a class set of this game to introduce the concepts of both to our classes. We usually stick to sports games, but this has us totally hooked.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 1.4.28
- Size: 182.38 MB
- iOS: 9.0 or later
- Languages: AR, CS, NL, EN, FI, FR, DE, HE, HU, IT, JA, KO, LT, PL, PT, RO, RU, ZH, ES, SV, ZH, TR, UK, VI
- Content Advisory: Unrestricted Web Access
- Developer: Sebastien Dubois
Last updated: 14th August 2020 | Genre: Education, Strategy | Developer: Sebastien Dubois