Rise of the Robots Longplay (SNES) [50 FPS]
37Developed by Instinct Design/Mirage Technologies and published by Acclaim Entertainment in 1994.
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For many of you out there the tone of this review is going to come as no surprise and I doubt that I will be saying anything new or original beyond what has already been said about Rise of the Robots.
The story involves a computer virus that has infected the robots of a large mega-corporation. Many of these robots are top-secret military projects that pose a serious threat to the populace's safety, so a highly advanced prototype Cyborg combat unit is deployed to tackle the threat and to take the robots offline.
The game itself is a straightforward round-based, one-on-one beat 'em up that involves the player tackling increasingly difficult robot adversaries, all before a final showdown with the Supervisor, a shameless rip-off of the T-1000 from Terminator 2.
To call this a beat 'em up is to give the game credentials it really does not deserve. The game features a ridiculously tiny set of moves (little more than a punch and kick) and some of the worst AI ever to grace a fighting game.
The key to winning is to find an attack pattern than works against each robot and to repeat it ad infinitum, until the enemy is defeated. Any attempt to deviate from the attack pattern will see you beaten into submission quickly and decisively.
Leading up to the game's release, the video game press had gone into something of a frenzy as Mirage (the original developers) promised gamers that this would be a revolutionary fighting game featuring state of the art AI, never-before-seen graphics and an audio score by Brian May. The PC version did at least feature some relatively high resolution (for the time) pre-rendered 3D graphics, but the core game was terrible.
With lower screen resolution and limited storage capacity, the graphics look considerably worse in this version. The cut-scenes are still present, but are just a couple of seconds long and look rubbish.
The SNES version does at least attempt to correct some of the shortcomings of the other versions. For example, this is the only version where it's possible to jump over your opponent and have characters change the direction they're facing. There's also parallax scrolling in the game's backdrops, and I suppose the character movement and animation is quite smooth.
None of this, however, means that the game is any fun to play; it isn't! Rise of the Robots is just a rubbish game, pure and simple. This is a game to be forever scorned with derision and featuring prominently in any top ten "worst games of all time" listings.
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