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:
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.
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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