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Rise of the Robots

Rise of the Robots

After a disappointing 90s fighting game, lets try and get back on the horse.  

I mean, it’s not like there was a shortage of 1 Vs 1 arcade style fighting games in that era.  Few of them were going to match the quality of Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat, but sometimes you just need a little change of pace. They already screwed up dinosaurs, but robots are cool too. How could you possibly screw that up?  Check out this add from GamePro back in the day.  Look at all these badass robots:
Image result for rise of the robots
But as we learned last week, just having a cool concept and shoehorning it into a fighting game wasn’t always a recipe for success.  Publisher Time Warner missed the mark a little bit with Primal Rage.  They missed it completely with Rise of the Robots.  I could say this game sucks, but that wouldn’t accurately convey how terrible it is.  I would call it crap, but I would never disparage fecal matter by comparing it to this game.  This game is an abomination, its the kind of mess that set the medium back years when it was released.

Let’s start with them graphics.  Like Primal Rage, it looks great when its on pause.  But unlike PR, where the game gets a little choppy when the action starts, this gets completely blurry and borderline unplayable.  The characters move like they are stuck in molasses, making every round feel slow and plodding.  The sound is just ambient noise, the sound effects are miserable and the backgrounds are boring and lifeless.

Image result for rise of the robots SNES

As for the controls, they are completely busted.  There is almost a full second delay between hitting the button and attacking.  That is unacceptable in any game, but game breaking in a fighting game.  The button layout is pretty standard, but take a guess as to how you do special moves.  Quarter/half circles? Charging? Button combos?  After all the complaining about PR, it must be that weird “hold button and do button combos” thing again right?  Wrong.  It was a trick question, there are no special moves!  None.  At all.  All you can do is punch and kick.  You can’t even throw.  Your character’s closest thing to a special move is a jump kick. 

And notice I said character.  As in singular.  Remember all of those cool robots from the Ad?  You can’t play as any of them, at least not in the one player mode.  The only way to play as the other characters is to enter the two player mode and play as the second player.  Not that it matters all that much because no one has any special moves, moves at the same speed and deals the same amount of damage, but that’s still BS.  Could you imagine playing Street Fighter II and only being able to play as Ryu?  Or Mortal Kombat where you could only play as Liu Kang?  It would get old really fast, and in that case you would at least be playing a game with fluid animation and be able to throw Hadoukens/bicycle kicks.  

Apparently, the selling point of this game was going to be its high level of enemy AI.  That never panned out.  There was also supposed to be music from Queen guitarist Brian May, but that must have only been in the CD based versions of the game because it certainly wasn’t on the SNES.  None of it would have mattered.  It could have had you playing against Watson to a soundtrack performed by May and a resurrected Freddy Mercury and this game still would have been worthless.

Do not, I repeat, DO NOT ever play this game.  Don’t even play it if someone offers you money.  Primal Rage may have been disappointing, but its worlds better than this.  You hate Shaq Fu?  You will be begging for Shaq Fu after five minutes of playing this garbage.  You absolutely need to fight robots? You would have more fun curb stomping a Roomba or getting into a slap fight with R.O.B. (or, you know, playing a different game about robots).  In all my years of gaming, I can honestly say I have only played one single fighting game that’s worse than this and that at least had the excuse of being a butchered port.  I can’t believe I paid $60 for this back in the day.  What a piece of trash.

0.25/10

Play this game if:
You are a masochist

Avoid if:
There is no “if.”  Just avoid it.
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