Saturday, September 24, 2016

1PanelReview RoboCop 3 (NES)


Of course the worst entry had to receive the worst tie-in game...

What it is: RoboCop 3 (NES)

Which is: A sidescroller platformer/run & gun action game
Created by: Digital Image Design/Probe/Ocean Soft/Acclaim Entertainment/Orion Pictures
Year: 1992
Available on: NES

 After the huge success of Paul Verhoeven's classic RoboCop, several video game adaptations followed suit after each entry in the film trilogy. The third film RoboCop 3 wasn't developed by Data East this time. Instead this episode was made by Digital Image, for publisher Ocean. While it's pretty similar to the other two NES titles on the surface, it certainly feels a lot more rushed this time.

There were various RoboCop 3 games released for all sorts of systems, but this NES title is unique and absolutely not the same as the one on the SNES or Mega Drive for example. It's a fairly standard sidescroller run & gun with some platform elements. More or less following the plot of the third film in the big lines.

 What's Good about it: One thing I can say is that it's a pretty detailed and colorful game, for the NES.
After a kickass intro theme song, it's a relatively similar game to its predecessors.
RoboCop 3 is much more a shooter this time. Each level is broken down into smaller segment. You get a couple specific missions like rescuing hostages, etc.
There is a fun new idea evolved from ideas seen in the past two titles - you have to take care of RoboCop's robotic body's status! In between stages you get to check and fix RoboCop's parts and repair the damages. It's actually a fun idea putting the money/score you get ingame to good use. And to a pretty great kickass tune while at it. And if you don't do that RoboCop might suffer malfunctions, like having issues firing with the hand holding the gun!
And you ever get to play with the jetpack, which is a great addition to the game's controls (unlike the film where it always came up cheesy and was jut simply an excuse to sell more toys).
There's a few boss fights including a tank! And the ninja-cyborgs here are a lot more fun to look at than they were in the film, even if they're more generic video game enemies.
I also love how the ending is just a big explosion, RoboCop runs off in a flash screen, and then... the game just kind of stops there. All of this just for that???

 What's Bad about it: Let me say it clearly, it's a pretty bad game!
All these RoboCop games got basically worse each time. This one's really bad compared to the first one.
It's also the most punishingly difficult in the series!
The gameplay is the clunkiest in the entire series here. Murphy moves really sluggish and even aiming to shoot at 90° angle is a chore.. and for some reason the only thing you can do easily and pretty quickly is jumps pretty high and uncontrollably fast for some reason!
The platform is really bad, particularly in the annoying sewers stage.
The stages are pretty generic and you have to go through pretty mixed usual tropes for these types of games, including the city streets, the sewers level, more streets in the daytime, a construction site, even more streets and finally OCP's headquarters. It kind of feels like they only had 3 types of stages in mind, and then tried to make up for it by copy-pasting the same city streets several times.
And the other problem is the game's also the shortest with only 5 levels total.

 Overall: RoboCop 3 on the NES is a pretty bad game, a pretty weak entry in the series.

 It was really the least fun of the trilogy.

And for some reason it's the most sought after episode nowadays.

I liked one or two ideas in the game - namely having to keep repairing the now-obsolete RoboCop between each stages - but otherwise it's a really sluggish slow-paced clunky run & gun game with lots of platform issues. Skip It!  
 
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