Hockey and basketball seasons are coming to a close, and we still need our fix of sports in the warm summer months, because we don’t all want to watch baseball. I mean, I do, but life sucks when the Mets are the best team in New York. (There are too many things wrong with that sentence.) And even though we’re more “cultured” than your average football/dick joke blog, the lesser footy can only take you so far when we all know the U.S. probably doesn’t get out of the group stage of the Copa América and definitely doesn’t get out of the quarters, let’s be honest.

Fear not, friends, because last summer the television gods restored to us the greatest sport of my childhood, the robot combat event known as BattleBots. 24 robots competed for the Giant Nut, familiar names were mentioned, and if I had a dollar for every time someone mentioned that Chris Rose and Kenny Florian were boring and awful I’d have a budget to build my own bot.

Since we were just getting our bearings here last year, there wasn’t a chance to go in-depth and hype/mock the contestants for ABC Season 1 (really Season 6). But Season 2/7 is here with double the robots, plus qualifying rumbles that already aired and you definitely can’t watch on Youtube like I didn’t (or you could just check the ABC site). They recently posted press photos of all the teams, so here’s an alphabetical bot-by-bot look as we try to pick who may have a chance at glory and who’ll probably be reduced to scrap. I’d go fight by fight in the first round, but that hasn’t been revealed. Some of these competitors may never see the light of the arena due to safety reasons! Yes, mangle your opponent any way you want but there are rules! (No entanglements, no lasers or smokescreens, projectiles are restricted, the robot can’t be able to break through the walls or make pieces fly through the ceiling, and a bunch of others I don’t remember off the top of my head.)

Ambush: Calls itself a lifter but I imagine it’s more like a clamper with four saws that’ll come down on the opponent. Looks like a decent idea, depends on how powerful the saws are.

Bad Kitty: Was eliminated in the qualifiers, I think it was a reskin of an old Comedy Central bot, it didn’t do much.

Basilisk: Also eliminated in the qualifiers. Comes with Afterbite, a drone that did absolutely nothing and got smashed out of the air. As opposed to Basilisk who got bashed in the face repeatedly from the beginning of its fight.

BETA: Made by the guys who built the great TerrorHurtz/KillerHurtz, BETA was supposed to be in Season 1 except TSA confiscated their speed controllers or something. It looks like a sturdier version of their bots from the BattleBots/Robot Wars days except replace the axe with a giant hammer and the polycarbonate’s been replaced with metal. That axe was powerful, and I think the hammer’s supposed to be even more powerful thanks to 10 years of technology and a fan at the bottom to prevent them from popping back up from their own force. Out of all the hammers I like this one the best, go Team Nostalgia!

Bite Force: The defending champion returns… with wheels instead of treads? And a vertical bar spinner? What the hell? Bite Force’s Season 1 iteration was a clamp bot (jaw comes down, traps opponent) and an absolute spinner killer, taking down dome spinner Warhead, drum spinner Hypershock (though just barely), and most impressively bar spinner Tombstone in the final. The tracks had rare earth magnets to give extra downforce (even though they weren’t even as strong as they hoped). And they’re going away from that? I know they had modular weapon attachments but that doesn’t mean become a spinner, why go that far away from something that worked?

Black Ice: Maybe not the prettiest of the rumble winners, but it did the job. Part of that was because the other two robots shat the bed, and I don’t expect Black Ice to get out of the prelims unless that wedge gets extremely lucky in its first match-up against something with an even higher ground clearance or if can stop a good spinner, which I doubt.

Blacksmith: Another one of the qualifier winners! It has a hammer. That catches on fire. Even though it nearly stopped working and caught on fire itself (nearly getting counted out), it dominated its fight against Basilisk and Gemini. And took Afterbite out of the air with the hammer, which was pretty cool. Not the prettiest looking bot, and I don’t know if it’ll go too far (I’m worried about reliability), but… hammer on fire.

Bombshell: More hammer bots! I guess one of the trends this year are hammers. I don’t know why, they seem hit or miss. It says Bombshell can go between an axe, horizontal bar, lifter, and vertical disc. Also it has a drone. So I guess since overhead drones are legal now (as long as they’re under 10 lbs. of the 250-lb. weight limit) everyone and their mother wants one. It seems stupid and I think they’re all going to be ineffectual this season and it’s weight they could have used on the main bot. Just because they’re legal doesn’t mean they’re useful.

Bronco: The class of the flippers is back, and boy does he look purty. Inertia Labs’s bot has to be one of the favorites to win the Nut this year as he looks to join his older brothers (Toro, superheavyweight, Comedy Central S4 and T-Minus, middleweight CC S5) as champions. He can do things like this.

Six wheels now instead of four and hopefully more power in each wheel so if one gets torn off he can still drive, which is what doomed him against Tombstone in the semis last year. I think everyone would love to see a rematch. Missing the wheel guards but I imagine against spinners those come back.

Brutus: Looks like a run-of-the-mill vertical spinner, but it’s listed as a “shooter” and has a pair of handguns, one on each side. Paintball guns aren’t legal, ball bearings aren’t legal, and I don’t think it can be CO2-powered, so I don’t know what’s the ammo and whether it’ll do anything. I doubt it, but I guarantee people will say “Oh, it looks cool.”

Bucktooth Burl: Okay, fire’ll do something against the fur on this one. But it looks like it’s meant to be a fun covering, in which case okay, fine, let’s chalk it up to being Canadian. Drum spinner, although I feel like I might want to be worried about its chain being in the middle, maybe something gets into the chain and jams it up. Two wheels, invertible, fine.

Captain Shrederator: Full-body spinner (the whole outside of the robot spins), former incarnations include Phrizbee and Shrederator. Full-body spinners can either be really good or really bad, and last year he lost in the prelims to Stinger (a well-known spinner killer). Maybe a better match-up takes them farther in the competition, and if all’s working well, watch out.

Chomp: Chomp went from a really bulky and ineffectual clamp bot with a flamethrower (not even crusher, clamp bot, come on, the name’s right there) to a bulky and who-knows-if-it’s-effectual hammer bot with a flamethrower. Name-wise, doesn’t make sense, but it went 0-2, getting KO’d both times, and didn’t deserve the wild card spot in my eyes (Nightmare should have gotten one), so I guess a change was in order. Looks like it lost its self-righting mechanism too, so if it gets tipped over it’ll be over.

ChromeFly: Two horizontal bar spinners, that looks intriguing even though I worry that a lot of these double spinner bots end up halving how much damage they can actually do if they had one bigger, more powerful weapon. The drone looks like it’s a flamethrower from above, which is a waste of weight they could have used on the spinners.

Cobalt: Apparently comes from UK championship pedigree, which means they know how to build a bot. Looks like a bar spinner with one side having more of the weight and the teeth. I don’t know if that works as well with a bar as it could with, say, a disc, but I’m sure it’s been balanced to spin properly. It’s invertible, which is always important, because if you get turned over you’d better have a way to keep moving or else it’s your own fault.

Complete Control: After a shoddy showing last season (beaten in the prelims and didn’t earn one of the four wild card spots) I expected a little more from a former Nut-winner (Son of Smashy, middleweight, back in the pre-TV days) and for a bot whose middleweight version made a final (before getting torn to smithereens). Maybe the clamp/lifter will work right this time, because against Ghost Raptor last year it didn’t.

Creepy Crawlies: Five 50-lb. robots. They got demolished in the qualifiers. Wait, Ian Watts was a part of this team? Come on, I expect better from you! Bring back Bulldog from the alternates last year! Bring back Bigger Brother or Little Sister! Anything but this crap! This was bugs getting hit by a windshield! I mean literally. Three of them got taken out in one hit.

Death Roll: Oh, I get it, it looks like an alligator, and the mouth is a vertical spinner! Kinda reminds me of Warhead, with the tail and the spinner, so I can get behind this. Also the Weaselo family has a soft spot towards gators. I’ll root for it even if I doubt it goes very far.

The Dentist: Looks like a pretty sturdy drum spinner, but that open frame on the sides makes me feel like it can be flipped. And I don’t know if those are tires above the main tires or part of the drive motors. If it’s the former, okay, but otherwise I’d be a bit worried. And if it is a motor, then it’s open enough to be attacked, and someone will do a number on it.

The Disk O’ Inferno: Woo, everyone loves The Inferno Lab, home of two lightweight titles with Dr. Inferno, Jr.. The new bot looks very shiny because the dis(k) has those shiny disco-ball things on top. I’m guessing it’s also heavy because otherwise this looks like a very small robot. I’m excited to watch a vet return, even though I could see the robot going one and done. But the good Doctor at first glance looked like a joke and he won the Nut twice, so anything is possible.

So there’s the first twenty or so robots to make up this year’s competition. Expect more contenders, more pretenders, more rookies and vets coming up in future installments.