The Cynical Gamer

Episode 3 - Rise Of The Robots

Video Transcript:

When I got this game I lived in a hellmouth, only nowhere near as cool and there wasn't a cute nosed, back-talking blonde kicking ass. In this town there was a cash and carry which sported a copy of Rise of the Robots. A game that I'd never heard of, had music by the great Brian May of Queen fame and looked awesome.

Back then I knew of the phrase "Never judge a book by its cover" and boy, did I wish I had followed that sentiment! This, incidentally, was the last newly bought game that I purchased for the Megadrive before it's days were numbered.

Unlike other people, I'm not a big fan of 1-on-1 fighting games, as I generally suck at them. Although, if I spent a bit of time on them I'd be quite good. Not only that, I don't mind if it didn't feature people beating the hell out of each other, as long as the gameplay was sufficient.

Rise of the Robots was developed by Mirage Technologies or Mirage Studios, depending on whether you read MobyGames or Wikipedia. It was released for a number of systems including the arcade, SNES and Megadrive, of which the latter two systems are what we'll be concentrating on.

The story was a concoction of plots from different film sources and had you, as the Cyborg character, named Coton, on a trail to avenge your creators murder by the hands of the virus infected master robot, The Supervisor.

You would be fighting against Loader, Builder, Crusher, Military, Sentry and finally The Supervisor - who morphed like the T-1000 and could be any droid that it wanted, including you!

The graphics for Rise of the Robots took a different direction than the tried and tested pixel art format, they actually had well done pre-rendered CGI and the music, well, the music that supposedly been done by Brian May was actually done in-house by Mirage themselves, after EMI kept delaying the score. Eventually, only the opening to The Dark was used in the title sequence. As a preference though I prefer the in-game music on the SNES.

The gameplay is where it really fell down, much like a 100 ton weight falling down a black hole. The opponents were really mis-matched and any hit from those that were powerful, this includes the first robot enemy, really ate your health, whilst you were reduced to tediously pecking down its hit points. There were hardly any moves, besides forward kicking and punching and the special moves were tricky, at best, to pull off. The two player mode only allowed the first player to default to the cyborg character and the second character to pick from any opposing robot, this coupled with the mis-matched balance meant that it was easy for the poor sod who was in the player 1 seat to get periodically defeated without much effort from player 2.

There is one thing of note, and that is the threat level for each opponent, The first two robots were too easy with a threat rating of "Minimum", yet when the Crusher comes around the threat rating is now "Dangerous". Crusher is the only robot which gives you any challenge. There was no learning curve and it felt like a cheap shot, were the next two going to be "Impossible" and "Better press the reset button now"? Actually, no.

Military and Sentry were at a High threat rating, whilst The Supervisor had "Extreemely High"! So, let's get this straight, Minium for the first two, DANGEROUS, high for the to after that and extreemely high. What the hell were these guys thinking??

All in all this title sucked so badly that, unlike other poorly made media, it shouldn't have gotten a sequel.

But it did.

RISE 2: RESURRECTION

hhhhhmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.