Rise of The Robots - Reception

Reception

While Rise of the Robots received many accolades for its state-of-the-art graphic design, it was almost universally panned by video game critics who found it highly frustrating. Many were unimpressed by the game's challenging controls. There were not many moves or combos available to the player, and many reviews pointed out that each android had a very small set of standard actions, causing the action to quickly become dull and repetitive.

In particular, the vast majority of computer opponents could be defeated by repeated use of a simple flying kick. Amiga Power described how review copies had only been released to the press a few days before the game went on sale, and concluded by stating that "it's probably because the graphics are good that the game plays so poorly - every move the robots make takes so many frames of animation, and so much memory, and so many months of rendering with 3D Studio, that it simply wouldn't have been possible to make the gameplay any more complicated than it is." Davies highlighted a number of flaws, including the fact that the players could not turn around, the limited sound effects and music, and the static background graphics. Game Informer declared Rise of the Robots the worst game of 1994.

A major issue was that the characters in the single player mode were positioned in order of mounting difficulty and the same character traits were kept in the multiplayer mode. This meant that the characters were improperly balanced in versus mode; some androids could inflict massive damage blows while others could inflict only minor damage. Because of this, Rise of the Robots was unable to contend with the more popular fighting titles of the time such as Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter. It did, however, receive a highly controversial 91% score from Computer and Video Games.