RoboCop 2

The Good
The plodding metallic law enforcer has been a bit quiet of late, his more recent outings being those direct to video low-budget ‘prime directives’ series of movies based on the Dark-horse comic books, and an auspicious multi format FPS from Titus, all of which hardly set the world alight a few years ago.

It seems Robos’ heyday is long past, but he had his fair share of escapades over many different formats in the past, and for me personally, this Amiga incarnation in particular, stands out among the pack. Unlike the first Robocop game, which was developed sort of conjointly with the Data East coin-op, but managed to prove itself superior to it’s coin-operated counterpart, with added variety in play in the form of a target shooting, and face identity coordination puzzle sub-games.

Robocop 2 for Amiga is completely different from the arcade game of the same name, but like the first game, bonus, or sub-games have again been included to spice up the proceedings, and add some extra needed variety.

Developed by Special FX, whom had in the same year done a superb conversion of another Data East coin-op hit for Ocean, Midnight Resistance, and even went as far as too heavily improve upon the music score of the original, as well as faithfully recreating the graphical side of things, fully utilising the Amigas’ unsurpassed custom chip-set, and subsequently continued this trend with Robocop 2.

Much like its console brethren, the bulk of the game-play here consists of a shoot em’ up platform action type fare, with a lot of jumping around, and negotiating hazards that often require good timing, such as periodic electrical beams, collapsable platforms, and steel compacting apparatus. The progression of the levels is fairly logical, and there are some interesting means of reaching new areas, such as riding on an oval shaped hover board, which handles with heavy gravity, and also at some points there will be a break away spot on a wall, where as Robo will face toward it, and by pushing fire will entertainingly bash through it and come out of the hole on the other side into a new section.

Your objectives are outlined at the beginning of any given level, for example in the first act you must collect ten nuke capsules, and also destroy the underground drug lab where it is being made. From this you can see there is some cohesion with plot elements from the film, and this is consistent throughout the game.

The status-bar here is displayed prominently at the lower part of the display, with your energy being represented by a mock Coca-Cola can, which becomes crushed and compacted as you take damage from the hazards and gun fire. You are given updates of the completion of goals in a mini LCD type display with scrolling text. Other details, such as your score, are given in a uniformly consistent visual fashion.

The levels are quite large, and surprisingly colourful given the nature of the environments, whilst not being garish, and this makes for some pleasing aesthetics. There are droves of thugs to contend with, which attack you with automatic weapons, rocket launchers, grenades, and mortars. These enemies are endless, so when you take them out, they simply re spawn shortly after, and the best you can hope to do is thin the heard the best you can. You also have to adhere to a time limit, so getting on with the tasks at hand is most crucial.

Just on a side note, the violence isn’t as brutal or gory as you might expect, and like the aforementioned Midnight Resistance, the enemies simply evaporate into a dusty explosion upon being dispatched.

In order to meet the quota of Nuke capsules mentioned earlier, you can destroy various objects that are strewn throughout the levels, e.g. bins and soda machines, and the collectable item will pop out of it in a charismatic fashion. Other pickups can be found in this way, such as weapon power ups like rapid fire, triple shot, and scatter shot, which provides a wide burst damage radius. Some other collectables included soda cans for energy, a shield - which gives you temporary invulnerability, and there are also pickups which impede your progress, such as reverse controls, and time drain.

On your travels you will encounter innocent hostages, who can be found at predefined points waving their arms in the air, crying out “help!”, fortunately, though some what unrealistically, they can’t be hurt by the barrages of gun fire and carnage from the opposing enemies, but this proves a definite plus, because if you rescue all of these hostages, you subsequently gain a handy extra credit.

The control here are very good, and Robo thuds about the place, and doesn’t move like greased lighting as you might expect. Something you won’t see him do in the films is leaping about the place, but since this is a platform video game you can jump around with the best of them, and you also have the ability to change direction in mid air, making the kevlar laden hero surprisingly agile. The collision detection is also very good, so your only enemy here is bad timing.

In dispersed throughout the game, there are digitised high colour images grabbed from scenes in the film, which really show off the machines’ superior graphics resolution and colour pallette, of which was not possible on other formats. As well as looking great, these cinematic touches brought some extra character to the game as a whole.

Between the standard platform levels, you are given another opportunity to gain an extra credit, in the form of a puzzle game. The play area here takes place upon a printer circuit board, where upon there is a series of red chips peppered about the board, as well as standard microchips. Your goal here is to destroy all of the red chips, and this is accomplished by passing a cursor, which moves one space at a time, over each chip. The catch is you can only move over any given space once, so you must figure out the correct route in order to cover all of the chips. If you manage to complete four sets of sequences, you are granted the credit. Some of the layouts are particularly difficult, and require you to think several steps ahead. The visuals here are very detailed, of special note is a monitor screen on the right of the screen composition, which initially displays static, but as you conquer the sequences, an image will start to become apparent, and this is a visualisation of Robocops’ memory being restored.

Failing this puzzle phase, you will be taken to a shooting range, where you can calibrate your skills, as the game puts it. This section is a simple single screen affair, with the gritty environ sporting a large derelict building, where various targets appear in and around the vicinity, including prop targets, such as a thug holding a hostage at gun point, gun toting gangsters’, as well as innocents such as police officers, and civilians. You are ranked at the conclusion for number of correct targets hit. These sections bring a welcome contrast, and definitely help with bringing some variety to the proceedings.

The audio is consistently good throughout, and the title tune is composed in the same style as incidental music from the movie, and is very good. The same can be said for the tunes during the sub-games, which goes to some lengths for making up for there being no music during the platform sections, which is complimented well enough with the various spot effects, like the mechanical buzzes when Robo draws his gun, the charismatic thuds when he plods around, and all the explosions and gun fire are equally well realised.

I have already touched on the visuals, but overall just a class act. Robocop himself looks as he should, all the character animations are smooth, makes great use of colour, loads of detailed scenes, and carries itself respectfully well even despite the very busy screens.

The Bad
Take this with a pinch of salt, initially the games’ difficulty is quite intimidating, and can be off-putting, but it’s worth persevering with because there are enough clever design elements, and good moments here which makes it worthwhile to stick with it.

The Bottom Line
Robocop 2 is a very polished piece of software indeed, and strikes a clever balance of platform mayhem, puzzle solving and target shooting, which just works a treat, and is undeniably the most lavishly blessed in the audio visual departments of any incarnation of the license, full credit to Special FX for pulling it all off. There is so many deviously conceived, though well implemented perils and pitfalls, and clever ties with the film, which gives the game a certain edge.