Just Another Day on the Nuke Beat

It’s interesting to look at the games based on RoboCop 2 and see a trend. The first RoboCop was great, and the arcade game based on it was also great. It was so great, in fact, that all the other consoles simply got ports of the arcade game, making for a solid, unified experience. You couldn’t top perfection so the game companies didn’t try. The second film was less impressive, though, and so were the games based on it. Heck, the arcade game took longer to come out than the other versions so it couldn’t even dominate the market (not that it would have since it wasn’t as good the second time around). And thus a mediocre movie got a whole series of mediocre games.

We’ve already covered the 1991 NES game, which is likely the version most people played (if they didn’t experience the arcade game), but now. We can step back to some of the lesser known versions, RoboCop 2 as experienced by players are various other home computers and consoles. And we start with one of the easier to find online (since I’m having to try and get after the fact and run them via emulation): the Amiga version of RoboCop 2 and… well, for an Amiga game it’s fine. The Amiga could crank out pretty graphics, and decent games to play, so it’s not like we have to be hard on the system itself. It’s just that this game is a short and uninspired mess. Sometimes being one of the first to the party isn’t always a good thing.

The Amiga version of RoboCop 2 is broken up into three sections. In the first part you, as RoboCop, move your way through a drug warehouse, taking out bad guys, saving hostages, and collecting Nuke until the place is (largely) cleared out. The second phase sees Detroit’s savior working through another warehouse, this time to track down and “apprehend” (read: kill) Caine. But, again, during the process you’re also saving hostages and collecting Nuke. You’re a cop and, apparently, this is what cops do.

Finally, in the third stage you head into the convention center where Caine, now as the second robotic cop of Detroit, lurks. You have to fight your way to the roof (although thankfully this time you don’t have to save anyone or collect anything) before finding Caine. Then it’s a battle with the cyborg all the way down the building, blasting away at him while he fires missiles and other projectiles. Deal enough damage and Caine will be defeated, exploded like so many other bad guys that you supposedly arrested, just don’t ask for the paperwork.

The main meat of the game is fine enough. Three stages isn’t a lot of game time, amounting to about 15 minutes, but honestly, these stages aren’t great and not having to play more of them was more of a relief than a problem for me. The stages remind me of so many other bad 1990s games, consisting of long mazes of platforms and passages, snaking up and down a building with nonsensical structure. I absolutely hate this kind of level design, and all three stages of the game conform to it. It’s bland and lifeless, feeling like you’re playing a video game designed to confound you and not, you know, playing as the hero actually exploring buildings. It’s bad. This is one of my biggest level design peeves.

Action wise, the game plays decently enough. The guns – your basic pistol, alongside the spread, rapid fire, and 3-way shot that you can collect and use with limited ammo – feel substantial enough. Enemies usually take more than one hit to kill, but you have so many bullets flying on screen that they all fall over eventually. Energy pick ups are plentiful and everything feels fair enough. I wouldn’t call the game a breeze, but the action was balanced enough that I never found it to be unfair.

The worst part is certainly that Robo moves like molasses. He’s so slow, as he should be since he must weigh several tons, and that wouldn’t be a problem if the game were designed well around his speed. But, instead, this is a platforming action game that expects this slow robot to do a lot of jumping and that is where things fall flat. The action is fine, but once Robo actually has to navigate around the mazes, jumping and leaping, it feels so bad. I hated these sections of the stages and would have preferred more shooting and less, well, anything else.

The game is also very padded despite there only being three stages. In between the first and second stages are two bonus rounds. The first part consists of a puzzle game, playing through four boards where you have to connect all the red chips on a motherboard to restore Alex Murphy’s memories. After that you then go to a short shooting gallery, blasting away with the joystick or controller at moving targets. Neither of these sections are great, and they’re clearly there just to add time to the supremely short game and give something to do. With that said, they don’t involve making our hero jump, so they’re aces in my book.

And, honestly, that’s it. That’s the whole game. Three stages, plus two seconds of bonus rounds, for a title that can be cleared in 20 minutes or less. It’s not exactly a thrilling time, and if I hadn’t just suffered through the NES and Game Boy iterations of RoboCop 2 I’d actually consider it a pretty terrible experience. Except those games are awful and this title is at least competently made if exceedingly short. Too short, really, especially for what little meat there is on this game.

While I know the Amiga wasn’t great at 3D graphics, it would have been nice to get some kind of driving sections in this game to add more to do. Even 2D top-down or side-scrolling sections with Robocop in a car or on a bike would have been great. New action with a different kind of shooting really would have done a lot to spice up the experience. Would they have been good driving sections? No, probably not. But it still would have added something. Even getting the game up to just over 30 minutes would have made it feel more complete, and anything would be better than more half-assed platforming in maze-like stages, that’s for sure.

Really, about the only thing this game has going for it is that it looks good. That’s because the Amiga had a great graphics card built in and could handle colorful, chunky sprites. Comparing this title to the NES version is night and day. Maybe it doesn’t look quite as nice as the arcade game, but this came first and got to set the standard and it does it well. The sound design is more lackluster, with only sound effects playing during the action stages, but the tunes we do get (like during the motherboard game) are decent. And everything has that Amiga twang, which certainly has its own charms.

Overall, this game could have been worse… but it also could have been better. It’s a fairly flat, incredibly short experience that only benefits from the fact that the Amiga could make it look pretty. It plays better than the NES version, but not as well as the (mediocre) arcade edition, but in general it leaves a lot to be desired. If I had to pick between this and the NES game, I’d choose the Amiga but, really, deep down, I’d choose neither. That sounds better.