Low-Rent Justice in 3D

Usually when talking about licensed games we’re discussing how well they’ve adapted a film that’s already been released. Game releases are generally tied to the films, using the film to advertise the game and get buzz building for its eventual release. A good movie will help a game, even if said game is mediocre at best. A bad movie doesn’t often get a game tie-in because the cost of developing the game and having it come out to a disinterested audience leaves the developer with egg on their faces. “What do you mean no one liked The Matrix Resurrections? What are we going to do with all these physical copies of the game tie-in?!”

Not seen as frequently, though, are games that come out before the film. Not just a little before, though: we’re talking well before, when absolutely no buzz has even begun to build for the film. And yet, such was the case for the RoboCop 3 PC game (released for DOC, Amiga, and Atari ST platforms). It’s based on RoboCop 3, of course, but where that film came out in April of 1993, the PC game was released in December of 1991, almost a full year and a half before the film hit theaters. Frankly, this was probably good for the fortunes of the game since RoboCop 3, the film, was a massive failure, both at the Box Office (where it barely made twice its production budget, meaning it might not have broken even) and was generally reviled by audiences. The game, coming out so early, didn’t have the stink of the film on it, so it might just have milked some money out of fans eager for the next adventure of Dertoit’s finest cyborg.

Not that they got a fantastic game out of the deal. Coming out as it did right in the big transition into 3D gameplay, RoboCop 3 shows many of the growing pains the action genre was going through at the time. Players were interested in 3D gameplay, and companies wanted to be able to push those titles out and show they had cutting edge tech. Any 3D graphics seemed futuristic and new back in the very early 1990s, and just having them could be a big selling point for a game. But 3D graphics didn’t imply good gameplay, and it’s on the gameplay front where RoboCop 3 absolutely falls apart.

The game closely adapts the plot of the third film, with our robotic hero getting assigned to the corporate security force put together to clear out the slums of Detroit so they can be torn down and gentrified. But Robo isn’t on board with this mission, having programming (and good morals) that dictates he doesn’t just kill random bystanders. He’s a man of law and order, so he turns on the very corporate mercs he was supposed to help and sides with the citizens of Detroit. This pisses off the suits at OCP, and they frame him for murder and make him public enemy number one. Now he has to fight back against OCP and clear his name all to save Detroit from terrible corporate leadership.

RoboCop 3 essentially breaks down into an alternating series of driving and shooting missions. You start out driving around Detroit, searching for a group of criminals driving a van, and your job is to stop and detain them. There are other driving missions that also boil down to “drive to this spot” or “also stop this van” and all of them are exactly as thrilling as they sound: they’re not. The 3D graphics, while good for the time, couldn’t really render a detailed or vibrant city so you’re essentially driving a boxy lump of a car through poorly detailed roads, looking for another boxy vehicle so you can crash into it or maybe shoot it down. It’s slow, it’s plodding, and it’s just not entertaining.

Slightly better are the shooting sections. Here you take Robo through a series of connected hallways, shooting bad guys while attempting to not shoot innocent bystanders. The basic mouse mechanics for these missions are fine, and none of them were really hard, even if there were some basic kinks that held them back. For starters, enemies are really good at shooting you around blind corners, leading to health loss on your part without any way to avoid it. Since there aren’t health drops in missions, it can be really annoying to get whittled down by damage you couldn’t stop simply because enemies could dead-aim you from blind junctions.

Additionally, two of the missions were search missions where you also had to find a specific target. Along with the shooting you essentially played a game of “hot and cold”, with a beeping noise getting faster as you got closer to the target. Mechanically it’s fine, but the beeping noise does get pretty tiresome over time. It would have been better to have a little meter at the bottom of the screen that fills as you get closer to the target than using an annoying sound that gets absolutely grating the longer the section goes on.

There are also two different kinds of mini-missions that get tucked into the game as well. There are two battles against a ninja assassin, which you would think would be interesting since these are, in effect, the closest we ever get to boss fights. But, hilariously, all you have to do is pull out your gun and shoot the bosses once and they die. All that build up for nothing which… actually, considering how easily these same guys die in the movie, that does seem about right. It’s stupid, but movie accurate.

And then there’s the one flying mission, where Robo has the jetpack and has to aid the police in protecting the streets. You fly around, looking for targets (marked in yellow on your radar) while avoiding the police (marked in green). Destroy all the yellow targets and the mission is over. This mission is obnoxious on every front. Robo’s controls are sluggish and slow, with the bot having a very slow turning radius in the air. He’s not very accurate, which is aided by a fairly forgiving attack radius for his shots, and it takes forever to get the hang of flying him. The city is also, again, very bland to look at so it’s not even fun to just fly around and see the sights. I get that the jetpack section is in the film so you kind of need to include some version of it but it’s clear this section needed more development time to feel good.

The one thing I will credit is that the game provides a lot of options for play. You can use keyboard, mouse, or joystick, with some combination thereof also allowed. And you can play the game from multiple perspectives: first-person, multiple third-person, and strange “robovision” as well. The game seamlessly switches between all these modes, and while most of them are unplayable from a gameplayer perspective, with only first-person view really being functional, it’s an impressive feat that all these different views were included by defeat. Technically, this game is actually kind of impressive for its era.

When you throw this game up against Bethesda’s first The Terminator title, it does actually come off as a solid kind of game. Its driving is better, its city looks slightly more detailed, and the shooting mechanics feel good by comparison. But then, really, Bethesda’s game, for all its ambitions, was really a clunky mess and RoboCop 3 is only better because of the comparison. When you put it up against the big behemoth that was coming in just a few months, Wolfenstein 3D, well, then it falls apart. This game is slower, clunkier, and not nearly as much fun. Yes, it’s true 3D and it has alternative playmodes that Wolfenstein 3D doesn’t have, but id software’s title is smoother, faster, and more polished in all the ways that count. It’s the better action experience, and it only took five months for id to blow RoboCop 3 away.

I have to think that if developer Digital Image Design had been given a generic RoboCop license and could have continued refining a series of games after this one, then they might have hit on a magic formula that really would work. This game is a bit of a clunky mess, but there are ideas and mechanics in it I can appreciate. It’s a failure, but a noble one. With another game or two to refine further, we might have gotten a really stellar RoboCop game from them. This isn’t it, but I respect the effort all the same.