Gladiabots vs Recursive
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both games, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Gladiabots
Design the AI for your robot squad and deploy them in strategic combat. Refine your tactics through a single-player campaign and online multiplayer modes. Customize your robots and compete in various game modes without ads or pay-to-win mechanics.
- Create and program robot AI
- Customize robot crew
- Single player campaign
- Online multiplayer modes
- Multiple game modes
- Tournament creation
- Asynchronous multiplayer
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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.
Recursive
A challenging puzzle game where you guide robots to collect gems by creating simple programs. Master recursion and logic with a minimalistic, easy-to-learn language and diverse level elements.
- Learn a simple programming language
- Solve puzzles with robots and gems
- Master recursion concepts
- Explore diverse level elements
- Challenging, hard puzzles
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Recursive is a puzzle game about recursion, patterns, and programming. It is the perfect game for people who love hard puzzles. Your goal is to help little robots complete their mission and collect all gems by finding the correct pattern and translating it into a short program. # Programming language (no prior knowledge required) The programming language is minimalistic and easy to learn. It doesn't require any prior programming knowledge and consists of only four instructions. - Move forward: Move one cell forward. - Rotate left: Rotate 90° left in place. - Rotate right: Rotate 90° right in place. - Change color: Load a chip of a specified color and execute the instructions it contains. And even with this simple programming language, robots can follow complex patterns thanks to the power of recursion and to other tricks that you can discover along with your progression in the game. # Rich levels Recursive offers a large variety of levels thanks to supporting multiple types of elements. - Robots: They can have different colors that reflect the chip they have loaded. - Gems: Your goal is to collect all of them. - Bugs: They destroy robots and make them disappear. - Chips: They make robots load a different program. - Teleportation gates: They make robots teleport to a different location. - Inactive robots: They are activated when touched by another robot. # Mastering recursion Recursion is said to be hard to understand as a famous quote attributed to Stephen Hawking says: "To understand recursion, one must first understand recursion." However, we believe that playing Recursive is another fun way to understand it or even master it.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is rating: Recursive at 4.9 against Gladiabots's 4.5. Recursive also leads on update cadence (every 4 days vs every 2 weeks) and price ($2.99 vs $3.99). Gladiabots's advantage is review sentiment (87% vs 71%) and ratings volume (90 vs 28). On ads, in-app purchases and device support there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Gladiabots costs $3.99 and Recursive $2.99 up front. Gladiabots sells 5 one-off in-app purchases and Recursive sells 3 one-off in-app purchases. Whichever you choose, the download price is not the number that matters.
Recursive holds the better App Store score, 4.9 against 4.5. Both are backed by a comparable volume of ratings — 90 and 28 respectively. Written reviews complicate that: 87% of Gladiabots's written reviews are positive against 71% of Recursive's, so the app with the better star average is not the one people write more warmly about.
Gladiabots ships an update every 2 weeks, Recursive every 4 days. The most recent releases landed on October 25, 2026 and October 24, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Gladiabots | Recursive |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $3.99 | $2.99 — better |
| Rating | 4.5 (90 ratings) | 4.9 (28 ratings) — better |
| Positive reviews | 87.2% of reviews — better | 71.4% of reviews |
| Number of ratings | 90 — better | 28 |
| Update frequency | Every 2 weeks | Every 4 days — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | Yes |
| Monetization | Free with in-app purchases — better | Paid |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod | iPhone, iPad, iPod, Mac — better |
| Requires iOS | 9.0 — better | 14.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 182 MB | 4 MB |
| Age rating | 17+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Sebastien Dubois | Kidori |
Customer experience
Gladiabots
Recursive
Bugs and requests
Gladiabots
Reported bugs
4 issues- iOS version not up-to-date
- AI logic bugs/unexpected behavior
- Screen not fitting iPad Pro
- Game not running on older iPads
Requested features
4 requests- Korean language support
- Option to toggle FPS (30/60)
- Add more robots
- "Quit" confirmation button in training
Recursive
Not enough reviews yet to summarise bugs or requests.
In-app purchases
Gladiabots
- Hello World Pack$0.99
- Script Pack$1.99
- Algorithm Pack$4.99
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- Automaton Pack$8.99
- Neural Network Pack$17.99
Recursive
- 10 hint credits$0.99
- 20 hint credits$1.99
- 40 hint credits$2.99









