Summary
The worst fighting game ever on the PC. Avoid at all costs.
The Good
The CGI backgrounds look great, but that's about it.
The Bad
Don't even get me started on this piece of crap!
Rise of the Robots is just one of those games that is so unplayable and completely devoid of redeeming qualities that you'll literally suffer severe brain trauma from it. Here is what the game has to offer you:
Poorly Balanced Gameplay
The biggest wound here is the play-balancing. Part of what made the PC's top fighting games (you know, games like
Xenophage and
Mortal Kombat) so fun, fair, and replayable was that you could select from all of the game's characters (excluding the boss characters) and tinker around with all of them to see which character best fits your playing style. Each fighter had different abilities and shortcomings, but made for fair fighting nonetheless. In
Rise of the Robots, however, you are stuck playing as the weakest character in the game: the Cyborg. Sure, this is a story-driven game, and not a tournament game like in
Xenophage and
Mortal Kombat. But when you can only select from the weakest character in the game, and are pitted against the most aggressive robot ninjas on the planet, you've got problems. You can select from different characters in the two-player mode, but the gameplay is so poorly balanced no matter which characters you select. If you're the player gaining the unfair advantage, you'll still be quite unsatisfied. If you're the weaker player, you'll be extremely infuriated when the game ends. Please, developers, the fighting genre is intended for
balanced fighting, not for clear victories and clear losses.
Horrible Advertising
Mentioning how many terrible lies there are in the advertising would be giving it way too much credit. They talk about stunning animation, a professional soundtrack, and an "enhanced hit detection matrix that enhances playability". How about this one word to describe it all:
LIES. Like I mentioned earlier, the computer-generated backgrounds look great. However, the smooth animation that was promised is completely missing from the game: there's only one frame for each action performed by the game characters. If you ask me, I almost got sick having to watch the characters chunking around on my computer screen. The professional soundtrack that was promised is also nowhere to be found. Every tune included with the game is a simplistic piece of techno garbage, and the sound effects are just about as low-quality as the music. Finally, if you ask me, the hit detection in the game is just awful and actually enhances
unplayability. Sometimes, you can hit a fighter with full health and it'll instantly die, but other times, hitting the same fighter with full health won't cause any damage at all.
Which then brings us to...
...the generally lazy interface. Why can't you jump or crouch? Why is there only one attack button? Why is there no "quit to DOS" option in the main menu? Whatever the answers to those questions are, somebody must have been
really bored when making this piece of crap.
The Bottom Line
If you're one of the people who had to suffer through this manure-in-a-box, I feel sorry for you. Even for the most hardcore fans of the fighting genre,
Rise of the Robots is a game that must be avoided by any means necessary. It's just plain garbage.
