Robocop 3

Genre: Action Developer: Sculptured Software Publisher: Flying Edge Players: 1 Released: 1993

Whenever you hear the title Robocop, it just manages to bring up so many memories and thoughts. Most of them are of the 1987 action/sci-fi masterpiece that starred Peter Weller as Murphy, a murdered cop brought back from the dead as a law-enforcing cyborg warrior. A massive hit when first released in theaters, sequels were naturally the order of the day, of which it received two official theatrical releases which were downright horrible, particularly the third film on which this Genesis review is based. But just how bad can a game based on an incredibly horrible movie sequel be? I kind of wish I didn’t know honestly, but part of me feels that it should be a public service for me to warn people about Robocop 3.

A side-scrolling action game, Robocop 3 puts you in the role of ‘ol tin-head, as he makes his way through Old Detroit gunning down crooks, scumbags, OCP thugs, and other assorted look-alike villains. It doesn’t amount to a whole much though, as the gameplay itself is more simple and mindless than one can imagine. This makes for quite a boring endeavor, which thankfully doesn’t last long in terms of length, although the game’s difficulty may stretch things out a bit longer.

Robocop 3’s difficulty is something that was panned when the game was first released. The NES version was a bit different, and a bit more fun thanks to in-between level mini-games where you could actually fix Robocop’s injuries and damage. The Super NES follow-up is basically the same thing you get here with the Genesis version, which was released afterwards. Don’t you think that the powers that be would have taken some time to fix some of the negative aspects of the game when porting it to the Genesis? Well, we are talking about Acclaim here (who use their defunct Flying Edge label), so that question seems kind of dumb to ask in retrospect. Anyway, the game’s difficulty is largely due to the fact that your enemies always seem to get the better of you, no matter what. This is largely due to the fact that Robocop’s weapon selection is lame, as well as his turtle-ish slow movements and practically broken jumping mechanics and the stiff controls don’t make things any easier either.

The worst aspect of the game’s difficulty however is the fact that when you come into close contact with enemies, your energy gets depleted so fast that you’ll never know what happened. I mean come on now, this is Robocop for crying out loud, he’s a cyborg! How has he been made so weak here that if your pixels even come in contact with an enemy you’re dead in no time? The developers took Robocop and turned him into a weakling, and it’s an absolute crying shame to be sure.

Graphically speaking, Robocop himself resembles his film counterpart well enough, while the villains are the typical stock type that one would come to expect. The stages look a lot alike from one another, most of the time I myself can’t really tell one stage from another to be totally honest. Robocop’s deadly robot nemesis the ED-209, which makes a relatively lame cameo here, actually looks kind of cool, but other than that, the game’s total look is a complete stale bore. Sound-wise we get the same theme repeated over and over again throughout the game, and the game’s sound effects are more annoying than anything else.

Finding positive points to speak about with Robocop 3 is hard enough to do on its own, but the fact remains that the cyborg hasn’t been treated all that well in the video game world. I remember pumping quarters into the old arcade game when I was a kid, and I remember having a blast doing so. The NES version of the game wasn’t bad either, but after that, any game featuring Robocop just hasn’t been able to do the justice that the character so richly deserves (and don’t get me started on the first-person shooter take on Robocop released on the Xbox a few years back). That is, besides the excellent Robocop vs. The Terminator, which ironically remains not only the best video game use of the Robocop license, but one of the best takes on his fellow cyborg monstrosity The Terminator as well. You’d be much, much better off checking out that game instead, and even if you manage to find Robocop 3 for dirt cheap (which you can), you’d be better off avoiding it all together.