Awesomenauts: A Clever MOBA-Platformer Hybrid Worth Remembering

Awesomenauts is a multiplayer online battle arena developed by Ronimo Games, a Dutch studio. The game released for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in May 2012, and for Windows in August 2012. It was ported to OS X and Linux. Atari acquired the game in 2025 and relaunched it as a paid title, bringing back matchmaking and other online features.

The relaunch makes this a good moment to look at what Ronimo built. Awesomenauts mixes a MOBA with elements from 2D platformer and fighting games. That combination is the whole design in one line, and it is the source of both the game’s charm and its limits.

Trailer, via Ronimo Games.

Two Teams, Three Characters, One Solar Collector

The setup is simple to state and hard to master. Two teams of three pick their characters before the match. Each side fights through enemy players, automatic drones, and turrets to destroy the other team’s Solar Collector, buried inside the enemy base. Whoever gets there first wins.

Every character is called an Awesomenaut. They differ in health, movement speed, and attack strength, and each carries regular and special attack moves. The voice-over work and the character designs do a lot of the lifting here. Ronimo understood that a roster is only as good as its silhouettes.

The Pit Monster and the Hidden Traps

Maps are not just lanes. Some contain hidden traps. One map holds a giant pit monster that consumes anything directly above it, and a player can summon it by standing on a button. That single mechanic tells you what kind of game this is: one where the ground itself is a threat.

The stages also carry health pickups and Solar units, the game’s currency. Terrain that can kill you is the clearest expression of the platformer half of the design. It is also the part that ages best, because a hazard does not need a server population to stay interesting.

Solar, Upgrades, and the Four Areas

Solar is the currency, and the economy is team-wide in a way that matters. Kill an enemy or a turret, and every member of your team earns Solar. Destroy a turret, and your side generates a super-drone that can take and deal more damage as it heads toward the enemy base.

Spending happens at your base, reached by walking back or by a short teleportation sequence. There you heal and buy upgrades. The structure is fixed: four areas — the two special skills, the regular attack, and general attributes. For each area you can buy up to three of six available improvements, and some improvements can be bought more than once, with the benefits stacking.

That is a real decision tree, not a menu. The stacking options mean a build can lean hard into one trick, and the three-of-six limit means you are always leaving something on the table. Death carries a respawn delay that grows as the game progresses, so the cost of a bad fight rises the longer you play.

Awesomenauts Assemble! and the Long Tail

Ronimo did not leave the game where it started. Awesomenauts Assemble! bundled in all the changes and additions available on Windows, OS X and Linux, and shipped on PlayStation 4 in March 2014, then on Xbox One in September 2016.

In May 2017, the Windows version transitioned to a free-to-play title, adding an in-game currency and reward system so players could gain access to new characters and other customization aspects. In September 2019, Ronimo announced that development on the game had stopped indefinitely. The game was still available to play until the servers went offline on September 15, 2023, due to Ronimo’s bankruptcy.

Awesomenauts is a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) video game developed by Dutch company Ronimo Games.

The Graft That Never Fully Takes

The roster is the strongest argument for the game. Each Awesomenaut plays differently enough that switching characters feels like switching genres, and the comedy and science-fiction themes give the whole thing a tone that never takes itself seriously. That tone is a feature. Plenty of games in this genre are grim; Awesomenauts is not, and the voice-over work sells it.

The weakest argument is the one Ronimo could not solve: a game built entirely around online matches has nothing to fall back on when the queue is empty. The 2023 server shutdown was not a surprise. It was the predictable end of a game that depended on a population it could not keep.

Atari’s 2025 relaunch as a paid title with matchmaking restored gives Awesomenauts a second life. Whether the population is large enough to sustain matchmaking is the open question.

What the 7.2 Actually Measures

The published critical aggregate sits at 7.2 out of 10 across eight outlets, according to IGDB. That number is honest about the game’s position. Awesomenauts is not a landmark. It is a sharp, funny, well-built take on a genre that was already crowded in 2012, and its best ideas — the pit monster, the team-wide Solar, the platformer movement — are the ones that made it worth playing then and worth remembering now.

The relaunch matters as a test of whether Atari can hold a matchmaking population. If it can, Awesomenauts deserves the audience. If it cannot, the game will drift back to the same place it sat between 2019 and 2023.

Worth playing, then, with clear eyes about what you are getting. A clever hybrid, and a roster good enough to make you forgive it.

Score: 7.2/10 (IGDB critic aggregate, 8 outlets).

Atari · Awesomenauts · Game Relaunch · game review · MOBA · Ronimo Games