The top Steam review lays out the value proposition in two lines: “How to lose your friends: Buy Roombattle, Play it with friends.”

Barcelona-based Dust Games dropped this chaotic party brawler today, and early returns suggest it belongs in the same friendship-straining category as Mario Kart and Overcooked. You control weaponized vacuum cleaners—adorable ones—battling across cluttered living rooms, offices, and outdoor spaces. The objective: pop the balloons strapped to your opponents’ backs before they pop yours.

The pitch is straightforward: up to six players, local or online, across 12 battle maps and a dozen minigames ranging from soccer to races to color-matching challenges. Controls are deliberately accessible—two buttons and a stick—but the mayhem ramps fast. Power-ups and mystery skills keep matches unpredictable, and you can tweak match length or add bots to fill lobbies.

At $4.71 during its launch discount (down from $7.49), Roombattle is priced for impulse territory. The game currently sits at #5 on Steam’s New Releases chart with a perfect 8-for-8 positive review score. The concurrent player count sits at just 9—party games live and die by word of mouth, and this one’s just getting started.

The customization system is surprisingly robust for the price point: over 300,000 combinations of hats, eyes, colors, and accessories. You can even use your phone as a controller, which eliminates the “we don’t have enough gamepads” excuse.

Dust Games built Roombattle with a festival pedigree—showings at Gamescom, BitSummit, London Game Fest, and a third-place finish at Pocket Gamer Connects’ Big Indie Pitch in Barcelona. The studio understands that party games succeed on one metric: do players yell at each other?

Early evidence says yes. There’s a demo on Steam if you want to test your friendships before committing.

Sources