RoboCop 2 (NES) review "Robocop 2 is not a good game. "

Robocop 2 is not a good game.

Its title character is a dead human strapped into approximately six tons of metal. Furthermore, he was built by a budget-conscious weapons company using barely tested technology. Technology fueled, I might add, by baby food. Someone had the bright idea of sending this piecemeal reconstruction against an unruly gang of ignorant and angry individuals.

Anyone who has seen Frankenstein knows how that ends.

I’m sure the OCP (Omni something-unimportant) corporation saw Frankenstein. In the movie version of Robocop, they seemed keenly aware of their creation’s limitations and dealt with this problem with great foresight by intelligently installing a targeting system that tracks villains and by giving Robocop what can only be described as a “hand cannon.”

In the game, on the other hand, you have an A and a B button... neither of which work very well. You’ll discover this for yourself when you come across the first bad guy and get punched to death by him. That’s right, street thugs in Detroit apparently have the natural ability to punch through solid metal.

Of course, this is a game, so it’s not expected to live up to our understanding of what passes for reality in Detroit. It’s also a game based on Robocop 2 so presumably they had to make it suck somewhat if it was going to capture the awfulness that was that film. Boy, they tried hard. In each level, you have to navigate Robocop through a set of platforming environments, making arrests (ie. punching people until they fall over) and collecting drugs (ie. walking over conspicuous bottles of scientific looking test tubes) along the way. Get this, though... make it to the end of the level without making enough arrests or getting stoned enough and the game penalizes you by forcing you into a first person shooter mode. With the wonder that are the game’s controls, this mostly serves as a chance for your friends to laugh at your feeble attempts to prove yourself at the target range.

I’m lying. If you’re playing this game, you don’t have friends.

Me, I wasn’t about to let Ocean take the piss out of me. I played for just long enough to ascertain that the game was truly terrible and then I moved on with my life, silently lamenting the five minutes I would never get back. These five minutes (which felt like hours) mostly involved several unsuccessful attempts to navigate Robocop over a pit of water. When I said earlier that Robocop was slow and clunky, I was referring to those times when he chooses to remain on the ground. When he enters the air he suddenly turns into a schizophrenic rocket pack, drifting back and forth across the screen in unpredictable twenty-foot-high bounds. Your desperate attempts to maneuver him to safety will be met with crushing defeat. You will wonder how a six ton cyborg which walks like it has a nightstick shoved up its asshole can achieve such wild lift off. All this is beside the point, though. The really pressing question here is: “what asshole sent a robot into a flooded section of Detroit?”

All I can assume is that it’s some kind of progressive commentary on our tax payer dollars going towards expensive military shit that ends up in some third-world country’s source of water. And I guess that’s kind’ve an interesting message. But not interesting enough to make the game worth my dollar.

Community review by zippdementia (September 22, 2009) Zipp has spent most of his life standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox there. Sometimes he writes reviews and puts them in the mailbox.