Clone Drone in the Danger Zone Turns 10 With a Free Anniversary Update on Xbox, Saw Dogs and All

Clone Drone in the Danger Zone is ten years old, and Doborog Games is celebrating by setting a robot dog with a saw for a face loose in the arena. The free 10th Anniversary Update is out now on Xbox, adding three new challenges, fresh Endless mode levels and a pile of quality-of-life fixes to the voxel slice-’em-up. If you play on Game Pass, it is already in the catalogue.

Three new challenges

The headline act is a trio of challenges, each with its own twist:

• Anniversary Challenge: a trip back through Clone Drone’s biggest milestones. In Doborog’s own write-up, the slightly unhinged Simulatron hijacks the arena’s power for a “restart sequence”, which drags the whole place back to its alpha days, so you end up fighting through ten years of the game’s history. Simulatron is also the first bot in the game with fully animated eyebrows, which is a genuinely important technological breakthrough for looking cross.
• Saw Dog Challenge: fans have been waiting a long time for this one. Creative director Erik Rydeman says a robot dog with a sawblade for a face was his first idea for a new enemy ten years ago, and he is only now making good on that promise. It only goes down when its sawblade face gets cut off or shattered, and the team animated a separate walk for every combination of missing legs. Enemy robots can ride it too. You can’t, because Doborog tried it and decided it felt awkward.
• Summon Walker Challenge: a co-op challenge spread across 10 new levels, built around the Summon Walker, a hulking enemy that spawns more robots. Doborog says it is the oldest scrapped enemy in the game and only the third it ever built, after the sword and bow robots. It was cut years ago because slicing up its chunky body made the game stutter, so this one is a proper comeback.

More Endless mode, fewer annoyances

Away from the challenges, there are new levels to fight through in Endless mode (Saw Dogs turn up there too) and what Doborog calls numerous quality-of-life improvements. The studio has also said the anniversary update brings a new matchmaker, which should give more accurate region ping times, stop private games claiming to be full when they’re not, and cut down on failed connections to matches.

The update is free for everyone who already owns the game. If you’re new to it, Clone Drone in the Danger Zone puts your mind inside a robot gladiator, where any limb can be sliced clean off. Alongside the challenges, there’s a story mode, Endless mode, online co-op and the Last Bot Standing battle mode for up to 15 players.

You can watch the anniversary trailer on Doborog’s YouTube channel, and more is on the official Clone Drone in the Danger Zone website. Everything else lives on our Clone Drone in the Danger Zone hub.

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