Robocop review - Nintendo Entertainment System

Robocop is set in the future, and the city of Detroit is caught in the grip of a crime wave the likes of which have never been seen before. The police force is now run privately by OmniConsumer Products, a giant multinational corporation. One officer, Alex Murphy, critically injured in the line of duty, is encased in a suit of titanium body armour, and let back on the streets as the ultimate in law enforcement - Robocop.

Controlling the laminated lawman, your task is to clean up Old Detroit by wiping out hordes of mindless thugs, and eliminate both Clarence Boddicker (drug dealer, and the leader of the gang of crooks responsible for Murphy's condition), and Dick Jones, the corrupt Senior President of OmniConsumer Products (the corporation who rebuilt Murphy's shattered remains).

Robocop is essentially a multi-level horizontally scrolling platform affair, with additional weapons and energy refills - and loads of bad guys!

Every so often, you need to get your targeting system recalibrated, so it's off to the firing range, to test your skills on some poor, defenceless cardboard cutouts. Once this is done, it's back on the beat, and time for more thug-mashing! It's you against them, so get to it - Old Detroit's depending on you!

What the Mean Machines staff thought

Robocop is one of my favourite films, so I can only express big disappointment at this half-hearted Nintendo game. Not only are the graphics very flickery and dull - Robocop's animation is truly awful and the backgrounds are very drab indeed - but the sound is also dire, the controls are sluggish and the gameplay is very repetitive. There's lots of trudging around shooting at badly drawn baddies, and very little else. Had there been more variety, Robocop might have been fun, but as it stands it quickly gets boring. Considering the all-action movie, I'm sure that a lot more could have been made of this.

Oh dear, oh dear, what a disappointment. With the success of the movie and the original game, you'd think a console version could be just as good, if not better. Wrong! The graphics are dull and drab, and the sprites jerk and flicker about the screen like ghostly puppets. Robocop himself slides about like a metallic Michael Jackson, and would more than likely make any crook laugh to death rather than quiver in his boots. The main title theme is enough to have you reaching for the volume in seconds, and the minimal pops and phuts do nothing to enhance the atmosphere any. Leave this one on the shelf.