Rise of the Robots is a fighting game that is famous for having amazing visuals for the time, but having amazingly bad gameplay. But is that really fair? Yes the game looked great for the time, and to be honest, I’m still fairly impressed with the graphics. But is the game actually that bad? Or was it just a weaker fighting game than the likes of Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter? Let’s find out, as I deep dive into Rise of the Robots!
In today’s video, I’m going to playing the Amiga 1200 version of Rise of the Robots. I’ll be specific about that, as after first playing this version for this video, I had to go and check other versions to see if what I experienced in this version was true of every version or just some design choices just for the Amiga game.
Recently, on the channel, I’ve been playing a lot of Street Fighter games. In particular, I’ve been playing the weird versions of Street Fighter games. I enjoy Street Fighter, but felt I needed something of a palette cleanser just so I could go back to the next Street Fighter game with the proper level of appreciation. Something that would give me perspective on whether the weird Street Fighters are actually bad. And what better way to test to see if they’re bad by putting what many call the worst fighting game ever through the paces.
Look, by the same token, having played so many unusual and some frankly bad Street Fighter games, maybe Rise of the Robots will come across like a million bucks.
The game sees you play as a big blue cyborg. I haven’t gone into all of the lore of the game, but I am aware that when you lose a fight you can see that there is literally a human inside the big blue armour of your playable cyborg.
Cyborg is also known as ECO35-2…I know, it’s a catchy name right. And ECO35-2 is the only character you can play as in single player mode. Think about that a second. When Street Fighter 1 first released you could only play as Ryu…unless you used the crafty method to continue a single player game as Ken who was the palette swap character for a two-player game. Rise of the Robots will let player 2 play as one of the other robots, but only in two player mode. There isn’t a way to play through the story mode as any character other than Cyborg/ECO35-2.
Cyborg looks like a cross between Robocop and the blue Power Ranger, and he’s not a badly designed character. But for my money, I’ve never been as into the fully suited, can’t see their mouth or eyes look of Iron Man and Optimus Prime and such characters. This is ok enough, but then cyborg isn’t a unique character as this is Rise of the Robots and literally all the characters are robots. Sure, there’s Transformers, and although people don’t complain that they’re all too samey (even though they should) the fact that all the characters are robots means none of them feel unique or special. Having ones that are the size of robot gorillas is cool, and the Supervisor, which is a T-1000 like final boss is something a bit different. I still feel that in Killer Instinct Fulgore stands out because he’s the only robot.
In terms of other fighters in the game, the first one you go against reminds me of the mech suit thing that Ripley wears in Aliens. The blue gorilla is the coolest looking one, but in my experience is just a snivelling coward who just ducks for cover at every opportunity. There’s a big red dude who in the cut scene before the fight flies like Iron Man towards you…and then doesn’t fly in the game.
In the case of the red dude, I was very aware that his size was a disadvantage for him as you could easily hit multiple flying kicks on him even when he tries to dodge you.
I’ve taken a look at a few versions of Rise of the Robots, and whilst some of the versions have scrolling backgrounds, the Amiga one at least, just has you fight in the fixed area of the screen as you start the fight in. Everything looks good and the game really does deserve credit in its innovative use of cgi renders for characters at a time when not much else outside of Rareware’s Donkey Kong Country and Killer Instinct was doing it.
But whilst the graphics were good, once again, it’s all robots and the locations look like where robots would live. Factories and places that all look a bit samey. There are even blocks that look like Portaloo’s.
Whereas Street Fighter has locations inspired by countries all over the world and Mortal Kombat had caves and dungeons, this is just metal and more metal. The graphics are impressive, but they’re also ultimately forgettable.
There was a lot of hype going into the games release. The main one was the graphics, and whilst they are cool looking, they are also bland. Then there was the music which was hyped that featured a soundtrack created by Brian Nay from Queen. Ultimately, he only contributed very little to the game due to delays. But that didn’t stop them advertising his involvement.
And then there was the advanced AI that would control the opponent robots. The AI was meant to behave in weird and unexpected ways to throw you off and also be smart enough to learn your attack style to counter it. As it turns out you can defeat the entire game with a repeated jump kick. As I’ve said with a few fighting games I’ve looked at on the channel, I attempt to not just do that in the interest of showing more interesting footage, but yeah, pretty much, just jump kick your way to victory.
The game has a power metre that charges up the longer you hold the fire button. Combine this with a direction and you’ll pull off stronger attacks. Little taps will deal less damage. Sometimes you’ll find an opponent can really knock off a lot of your energy if they manage to land a blow, but this is rare.
The Amiga version has no music, which is a shame when you consider that they did manage to include all the short but impressive CGI cut scenes. But I guess it was a case of one or the other. It’s weird then that the music of Brian May being included was such a big part of the game’s hype machine.
The worst part of the Amiga version is that you cannot seemingly jump over your opponent and fight facing the opposite direction to where you start. This is crazy in a fighting game. I had to test to see if you can face the other way in the SNES version and you can. I just don’t get why this wouldn’t be possible. Maybe some of the enemy fighters aren’t quite symmetrical to just flip the artwork. Who knows.
The game only lets you play as one character and the game also makes you start the game from scratch if you lose any fight. You go through all the same fighters twice, and at the end of this run you face the Terminator chick. I’ll never quite get what the fascination was with hot robot women in the 90s as we got this and Dural as the final boss in Virtua Fighter in consecutive years both as the final bosses.
I also tested the Amiga CD32 version and that seemingly is just the same as the A1200 version. Weirdly in trying to get it to run I experienced the CD based game ran really fast…and I’m not going to lie; it made the game a lot more fun! If the game had the option for turbo speed that would have been something more to keep up interest.
As it is Rise of the Robots hasn’t changed my opinion on this instance to convince me it’s not as bad as people say. The graphics are good, but the location and character designs leave something to be desired. There are still more versions out there for me to test, and I’ll try to check some more out on the channel in the future.
Did you play Rise of the Robots back in the day? Is there a version which is better than the poor Amiga game that I’ve played here today? And does the game deserve its poor reputation? Let me know in the comments!
What would you rate this game?
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