365//365: Day 073 – Robocop vs Terminator (GEN)

When it comes to crossovers, the end result isn’t always pleasant. When Superman and Spider Man first clashed, the battle, and the story its self, was pretty underwhelming. Alien vs Predator in the arcade and on the PC were amazing games, yet the movies were a cruel joke. Mortal Kombat vs DC met with some commercial success, but the lack of an M rating really took away from the experience. Then there’s Robocop vs Terminator on the Sega Genesis. While the thought of a crossover between these two franchises might seem pretty intriguing, the overall execution is just barely above average.

Blowing away an enemy has taken a whole new meaning.

The one thing that this crossover did nail down, was a dark, grimy look to it. Terminators are taking over, and the world looks dark and depressing because of it, though there’s enough color variety to make the world come to life more. Robocop looks great, and animates well. Human enemies are repeated often, though it shuffles up more as you progress, throwing in lots of Skynet mechanical bad guys into the loop. It’s a visually pleasant game, with some violent human deaths thrown in.

For the most part, controlling Robocop is quite painless. He has a decent jump distance, speed and maneuverability for something that probably weighs a ton or more. You can aim in quite a number of different directions, making dispatching enemies a lot easier to do. Unfortunately this is about where the praise ends.

Robocop -- defying all logic once again!

While on the subject of controls, I find it extremely perplexing how Robocop is able to climb across pipes, hand over hand without the pipe support above him breaking. Not only that, but if you keep at it, he’ll accelerate faster and faster. For a character that walks as slow as sin during the movies and in this game, he sure can advance in lightning speeds when climbing and hanging. Then there’s the matter of weaponry. If you lose a life, you lose whatever two weapons you had previously. This means you’re down to using Robocop’s extremely underpowered handgun. If you die during a boss, you’re better off just resetting the game or losing all of your lives and restarting the stage, hoping and praying you don’t die before the boss, or during the boss. It takes way too long to kill any boss with your default weapon, even the first boss.

The difficulty really darts up after the first few stages, even on Easy. Again, if you are playing through any stage without any other weapon besides the default weapon, you’re going to die fast and take forever killing enemies. Not only that, but you have no invulnerability period between hits. So one wrong move next to a boss, and your health will deplete faster than your patience with the game. It makes the game harder than it should be and frustrating to try to play through.

ED209 is an extremely frustrating boss battle.

The audio is a mix of decent effects and lack of musical diversity. If it music sounded more dark and chilling, and less repeated and anything but gloomy, it would do the audio in general more justice. The rest of the audio does the game justice, with the guns sounding powerful enough, without the glitchy sounds the Sega Genesis has been known to give off with its sound effects.

The pairing of Robocop and Terminator is a great idea on paper. If the concept was attempted once again with today’s gaming technology, and with a competent developer, I’m sure it would be an epic experience. Robocop vs Terminator on the Sega Genesis is barely an above average experience, that looks very good, but has some glaring gameplay faults that will push you to possibly giving up before you get too far in. Give it enough of a chance and you may find a half way decent game, but it’s hard to give something so frustrating and cheap a chance.

Rating: 6.0