89. Rise Of The Robots

(Various Home, Mirage, 1994)
When I drew this game from the hat I considered not adding it as enough has been documented already that I cant possibly add to.
But I made a promise to myself to abide by my own rules, so here we are:
Rise of the robots was a one-on-one fighter which was released during the fighting game frenzy of the early 90's. It was designed for the Amiga then ported to a whole host of consoles. ROTR was hugely hyped in its development, with some incredible screenshots, magazine articles and TV appearences promising a visual masterpiece that would take both graphics and fighting games to a new level, almost to art form.

Rise of the robots is fucking rubbish.

Seriously, were you around at the time? do you remember the pages in magazines dedicated to the building of this game? You couldn't avoid that stupid Gorilla robot, he was EVERYWHERE.
Arguably the worst fighting game ever made, ROTR is dull as hell.
After much disk swapping to get through the extended intro, the player is finally greeted with a much needed option choice: Phew, thank God they didn't spend so much time on the graphics that they forgot the integral "SCREEN SHAKE~~~" option. I couldnt find the "Make Game Good" option.
The player controls Cyborg and makes his way through a series of fights against super intelligent machines that have revolted against their human masters. When I say "Super intelligence" I of course mean "The ability to sit in the corner and fail to block Cyborgs slow motion flying kicks"

Squaring off at the end against blatant T-1000 rip off "The Supervisor" Cyborg saves the world and robots, well, I don't know, I skipped the ending.
I don't want to be unprofessional and mock for the sake of cheap heat but this game gets me so mad, it has this pretension of being "a cut above" all other games but it fails hard in almost every department, even the graphics, good as they may have been for the time, look like crap on most of the ports and the 200 disc FMV scenes barely made it into the lesser powered versions, thus leaving the question why bother to port it at all?

The engine is shoddy, without the slightest attempt at encouraging any tactics or combos. The A.I is poor in a game where the whole plot is about A.I risen to genius levels, the characters are mainly boring in design, you can only be the Cyborg in one player and he barely has any defining features, he's just this really blue dude, they might has well have just made Horace the hero.
Finally, Brian May wrote a soundtrack, but most of his music didn't even make the game due to time constraints, Don't get me wrong, that's a plus point, but also another example of the game failing to deliver on its design plans.

Im done. It's just simply awful. But you knew that already, right?