Rise of the Robots Review: The Whole Story (Amiga, Sega, 3DO, PC etc.) - Kim Justice 

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To be fair, in some sense this *was* the future of gaming: endlessly delayed, over-hyped, broken on release, and full of unfulfilled promises. All it's really missing is microtransactions.

This game honestly made me stop reading gaming magazines for seven years.

The title change in Bad Influence was them literally offering every gaming journalist free artwork in the style of ROTR for free publicity. They even made a robot version of Dave Perry for publicity. (there should be an image of it on the web, it's on the archive of his website for sure)

6:36 Promising a novel, a movie, a line of toys and the kitchen sink reeks of how _Mighty No. 9._ tried to become a multimedia franchise.

Fantastic work! Great detail and research. I got wrapped up in the hype, as soon as it came out i popped down to my local rental picked it up for the MD and i was gutted with the first few minutes of playing it. One of the biggest turkeys i had the displeasure of playing.

It was almost worth this game being made just so that Amiga Power could write that review, legendary

"Wise of the Wobots started the hype back in nineteen nindy-twee"

Strange, I never ever played Wise of the Wobots before...

Wise of the Wobots.

I love the look of this game. There's something about early 90's CGI that is so charming to me. I wish the gameplay was better so I could enjoy it.

Ah, the classic lesson that top of the line graphics should never take priority over the actual gameplay. You hear that, Sony and Microsoft?! You can polish a turd all you want, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a *turd!*

I bought all the hype hook line and sinker and then lost a bit of my soul when the game actually came out.

"It's not a conventional beat 'em up. We're using a lot of artificial intelligence... We'll definitely have one over Street Fighter II" ............BAHAHAHAHAHA! That is the most hilarious and embarrassing quote I think I've ever read in a gaming magazine! Brilliant!

I recall the lead developer (Sean Griffiths?) on Gamesmaster, bullshitting about the gameplay, "it DOES play as well as as it looks", etc. Unless the developers were all in denial, there's no way they could have thought the game was good. They had the mindset of 'we spent months rendering this shit, we need to get something back for all that time, effort and expense' and allowed it to be released. Apparently they came clean later and admitted the game was dreadful.

Basically the No Man's Sky of the 90's.

Its true i remember this game being every where. Especially UK Gamesmaster magazine.

These aren't reviews, they are little gaming history lessons. Great!

8:50 "It's the first beat-'em-up to use full ray-traced graphics throughout" - ...would've been, except they were beaten to the punch (by a couple of months) by One Must Fall: 2097 on the PC, which was actually a decent game IIRC (even seems to have a small cult following still). Also, why is that big robot at 21:18 doing the British "wanker" hand gesture at us?

I've always been somewhat fascinated by this game. I wish more of the developers would actually talk about it because something must have gone seriously awry during development. Was it a case that they simply bit off more than they could chew, and didn't actually have the knowledge/experience needed to make a decent fighting game (see the Sega game X-Perts for an example of something like this)? Was development derailed by the need to constantly feed the intense media attention? Was it just intended as a cheap, low profile game that ended up being massively overhyped by the publisher and developed for too many platforms? I think a post-mortem of the game's development could be quite interesting if the developers would only go on record.

"Waste of time"? Is that it? I beleive it was Sega Power who called it a "curly great turd of hype, oozed from the putrid anus of the gaming industry", concluding with "Put THAT on yer box and sell it". Hilariously, in 1999 my Amiga fanatic friend tried to impress me by telling he'd got "Rise of the Robots and everything" on it.

Brilliant intro. Glad you can poke fun of your impediment. Its your trademark. Glad you realize this :)

17:10 - Is that Kraftwerk’s “The Robots” in the background? Nice touch!

Awesome video as usual! Really informative and super interesting! You're quickly shooting up to be one of my favorite RU-vid channels! Keep it up Kim!

Great look at this game. I remember buying this game as a kid with all the money I had painstakingly saved. All the hype and cool pictures were enough for me to trust that it is a good buy on release. Oh boy was I wrong and downright devastated. I still consider it one of the worst purchases I have ever made in my life.

I have come to realise that your reviews are the best on youtube BY FAR. the research you are putting in to them, the editing and the brilliant commentary. looking forward to another year of great reviews, cheers Kim!

Never would have guessed that this obscure little bad game occasionally reviewed on YT had THIS MUCH of a legacy back in its time. Thanks for the insight!

Loving your work Kim. Very interesting, brilliantly researched and put together. Thank you.

I remember the hype surrounding this game, it was insane. It was towards the end of my Amiga's life...I was thirteen years old and forked out over £30 for the 1200 version. I couldn't believe how sh*t it was. It wasn't the never ending disk swapping - I was used to that, being a huge Monkey Island fan, it was the shocking, shocking gameplay. I tried to like it, I really did, but I was back playing Mortal Kombat 2 within hours. I remember being an avid 'Amiga Power' reader, but on the month of its release, I (mistakenly) bought 'Amiga Action' with its absurdly high score, leading to two months' pocket money spunked. Other colossal wastes of money: Gazza's Super Soccer on the Spectrum, a Barcode Battler (still don't understand what it was supposed to do). Merry Christmas KJ, keep up the good work.

The second half of the video about games journalism was the best.

Your videos are fantastic, you go right into the details, a real labour of love

such a great vid! I was sold hard on the hype back in the day and was extremely let down when I was finally able to rent the game. I kept hoping there was a port somewhere that did the game justice. I love the end where you discuss the details on the disparity among the reviews - something that needs more honest investigation even now on gaming sites

I come to this video for comfort Kim- you do such damn good work

is that 3D Studio 4? Dos version lol....even before 3d studio MAX

Hello, Where can we find magazine scans of the 3D model renders/illustrations? The ones that are not in-game.

The narrator sounds like a Elmer Fudd's British if somewhat camp sounding cousin. *jokes*. Top quality videos though Kim. Subscribed! :-)

I remember when I bought this game for PC when it came out. There were posters and promo material all over the store, and a massive row of shelves filled with only this game. For a split second, the fact that all the shelves were *full* struck me, but I assumed it was because they were just keeping them stocked up. I noticed a couple of employees smirking at me, but I just assumed they were just bored idiots with nothing better to do. When I got home and played the game, it all made sense. This was the experience that taught me to see through the hype. Lesson learned.

The main blue robot look like Pepsiman lmao

Good video Kim. I was a freelancer for Future publishing between 1995 and 1997. I heard many a story about the hilarity that was ROTR. I also knew all about rival magazines propensity for 'winning' exclusives in return for a guaranteed 90%+ score. Magazines like C&VG were losing market share to Future magazines and it seemed ethics went out the window when it came to giving an honest appraisal of a game to a readership who had a limited income for buying them. As far as I know, Future magazines didn't fall into that trap but there were some pretty blatant attempts to buy review scores, that I witnessed from games PR firms in my time as a freelancer.

I really don't know how people con say Delphine Software's Shaq-Tu is the worst 16-Bit fighting game when something like Rise of the Robots exists. That game was at least passable, it just had somewhat delayed controls (that you can get used to!) Here are a few quotes (translated) from german magazines for your amusement: "The only time I laughed while testing the game was when I read this quote from the Game Gear-manual: 'Due to intelligent programming the enemies learn the player's attack strategies and adapt to it' [...] Only Dirk was able to have some fun with the game: 'I beat him' he told me after blindly hammering the two buttons on his game gear for 30 seconds." (Video Games magazin, they gave it 23% on the GG, 38% on the MD) "What have I done that I have to test this game?! [...] In 1P mode it depends on luck if you win or lose" (Mega Fun Magazin, he gave it 38% on the SNES and 33 on the MD) "The are lots of Special moves: One for every fighter, to be exact, and it almost never even works!" (Video games magazin in a seperate test for the SNES version, which received 40%)

I've never heard of you till today, but this was an interesting and well researched video. I like it.

My brother and I had this on PC back in the mid-90's. I remember it came on like 10 floppy disks. Believe me, the loading was not worth the wait. One of the worst game I've ever played. The only saving grace is I think we got the game on sale.

Hi I was just wondering are you using adobe premier to edit the video clips you find in?

And yet OMF 2097 was what everyone ended up playing, at least on PC.

where did you get the death scenes from the arcade versión?

Entertaining video. And kudos for the use of Add N to X ;)

It would have been interesting how this game might have turned out had Time Warner not gotten their talons into it. It might have been rather decent, but i don't think it would have been the SFII beater they were claiming to be before Warner helped screw everything up.

Your accent belongs in a charles dickens novel, fam

You seem to imply the 16 bit doesn't have 3d graphics. But I suspect no version has, they are all pre rendered sprites, aren't they?

Today marks the 25th anniversary of this game.

A terrific look at an abysmal game! I remember buying Rise 2, having not played Rise 1 but remembering the marketing campaign, and thinking the best part of the game was the Brian May song... that didn't appear in game but was on the CD. Great work! Keep it up!

Can't believe you have dislikes on your vids man.. These are awesome and glad found channel. Keep up great work👍

Great video Kim. One of your best.

I love the use of Kraftwerk songs on this video, very fitting.

The first and last game I ever preordered. Lesson learned. I seem to remember my dad had a colleague who was cool enough to be into games around for dinner that day, so it's a bit of an embarrassing memory.

Ok, this is a legitimate look at a terrible, terrible game. I remember the hype and the fallout, but I had no idea about the UK magazines praising it. Wow. So much shady games "journalism" back then. Your videos are fantastic, Kim.

LOL @ the sly viz book at the end @ 18.11 Which one is that, i have not seen it? It looks huge! (and i have most viz books)

I'm not sure if anyones already asked but at around 7:00 in the video there seems to be a montage of death scenes or similar of the each robot killing each other instead of just cyborg. Where are those from? I've seen a version of the game that had failures for Cyborg but not those. Any help? just curious to see them if they exist.

Very well done. I remember this all too well, and I remember playing a 'demo' version that came on one of the Amiga magazine coverdisks, and thinking at the time what an utter pile of shite it was, and that there was no way I'd be buying the full version for any amount of money. And for that, I'm thankful. I remember reading reviews that sung it's praises, and coming to the conclusion that the publisher had paid for an advertisement to look like a review, particularly when other reviews were, umm, not as full of praise... Many years later (in fact, only recently) I tried out the CD32 version. And I'm so glad I didn't waste my cash back in the day when I owned a CD32, or got the A1200 version for my A1200, or even got it to use as a door stop... Thank you for a job well done, as usual. This game was, as I've seen you write, "as basic as a sinclair spectrum", and I hope you don't mind me quoting you there, but it just seems so perfect for that game, when compared to so many other absolute classics from the era.

Amiga Power was a great mag, used to look forward to it every month. Great video as always mate.

Fantastic work as always Kimble, everything surrounding this game is so hilarious in retrospect. Such a cynical case of the marketing being the focus as opposed to the actual product.

You are so good at what you do I don't understand how you don't own the genre and rule RU-vid.

omg those black sqaures flashes is hurting my head! Kimble stop those!

I saved up birthday money and pocket money to buy this as a kid on PC. I can still remember the dawning sense of disappointment when I started playing it. I think I stopped playing after literally three fights. Gutted. It’s still one of my first memories of feeling truly ripped off.

Great mini-documentary, Kim. Even my child self knew to rent this game and take it back immediately. Do you happen to have any info on what happened to Jonathan Davies (the Amiga reviewer who slated the game)? Was wondering if he was still out there working but I can't find anything!

Excellent review. I remember this game getting 90% CVG, the review was in a large pull out section and i was rather excited to get it. Managed to dodge the game though, thx to unemployment. Ever gonna do a full Syndicate review Kim?

Here from Matt McMuscles, and this history/review is amazing. I didn't realize that it was hyped so much in the UK. Also, that Brian May song that was supposed to be part of it is a banger.

Wasn't a huge fan of the game (I had the PC version) but! I remember there being a huge cardboard RofR robot in WH Smiths and I asked someone in there when they had finished it if I could have it (I was like 16? ish) - one day I walked past the shop and the guy came out and said could take it.. the thing was like 6ft tall and it was awesome having it in my bedroom. So I got that going for me.

Wow.....I forgot how utterly gash this game was - in the same way you subconsciously suppress bad memories, I couldn't even remember whether I'd played it. Within a second of seeing the "game" footage it all came flooding back. The "horse wank" quote sums it up perfectly. Great video again.

I worked with Andy Clark, he's not particularly proud of this project, though i loved it when i was a kid. Btw, his latest success is Project Cars!

13 disks. 13. That is INSANE. Also, this is a great video as always!

I remember having a pirated copy of this with loads of disks...a totally broken game, shower of shite!

"How about a novel written by Penguin?" I read that one, I think. Found it in the library at one point. Vaguely remember it as being weird and interesting.

Fantastic vid. If only there were more Amiga Powers and Jonathan Davies around these days to call out the likes of Bethesda, gaming might be in much better shape.

Instantly recognised Stuart Campbell's writing style at the end there. I remember all of this so well. I wonder how many people were turned off games entirely by this.

Kim wins again! Once i heard Kraftwerk “we are the robots” i thought my iPod was on but it was your video 👏🏽🙌🏾👏🏽🙌🏾

I remember Brian May talking about his 'contribution' on a Movies Games & Videos feature. He could not have looked more disinterested.

How come some people consider Kim's way of speaking a speech impediment? I guess it's an accent from a region in England. I understood him perfectly, and I'm Argentinean (hence, a non-native speaker of English).

"The useful thing about researching rise of the robots.....oh my god" That was so funny the way you cut that bit together. Genius.

So hyped. We were so terribly lied to with this game. We had all the mag coverage and even appearances on GamesMaster/Bad Influence were we pitched super hard saying it was "plays as good as it looks". A real low point for gaming journalism and trust was not recovered for a while for us who relied on them.

Good video and I think you managed to capture the epic crapiness of this true stinker and blot on video game history. This game truly was memorable for all the wrong reasons. I unfortunately fell for the hype as so did many others. I remember vividly to this day how you couldn't escape the juggernaut of an advertising campaign. Then reality quickly hit after my older brother so kindly bought me the game for my Amiga 1200 at £30. Even though it wasn't my money, I actually felt bad for him after the initial excitement turned to horror. I followed Amiga Power and had that very issue that you referred to. They were harsh but fair in their reviews but they absolutely brutalized ROTR and rightfully so. It remains for me, one the funniest and brutal reviews of any entertainment medium. It became blatantly obvious very quickly that something was seriously amiss when Amiga Power awarded it 5% and other publications 90% plus?!?! Alas, the truth transpired too late and many unfortunate gamers were too traumatised to fork out their pocket money for several years to come.

I live in the US and I'm glad to see that we weren't the only ones to have their gaming magazines giving this piece of crap nearly perfect scores. However, I remember some magazines like GamePro giving RotR glowing praise BEFORE IT WAS ACTUALLY RELEASED! Perhaps instead of bribing publishers and reviewers, they should have put that extra money into making something good.

I'm still waiting for Brian May Soundtrack, since 1994. Those chords could be done by any guitar beginner with 1 week of experience.

1:30 Aw bless you honey. I’m a fan of anyone who can poke fun of themselves...and who also references Python.

Great comments about Edge magazine. Never has one publication done so much to make games seem so dull and tiresome.

I remember waiting years for this shit game on the mega drive I got it home put it in 10 minutes later I was back down woolworths demanding my money back this piece of trash was meant to change the future of fighting games lol only thing it changed was my temper in woolworths.

Great video Kim. I remember all the hype and what a load of crap it was

I read Computer and Video Games for a long time, and that includes this hype period. I still remember the hype for ROTR really well.

Wow what a fantastic video ! I found the review scores amazing, just how ? I used to religiously buy CVG until they reviewed Mortal Kombat. They gave the arcade game some middling score then when the hype kicked in the home console versions all scored 90% + ! My other magazine was ST Format and Sega Magazine but ST Format seemed to hate any action/arcade style games and Sega Magazine more or less scored everything high. I slowly started to realise the magazines had their own agendas and just stopped buying them. Again another great video brilliant !

I bought this game as a kid for 60 bucks, probably the worst game purchase I ever made. Especially at a time when stores would not allow game returns or I would have returned it the day I purchased it.

3D rendered graphics and fmv on a system that can only do 32/64 colors on screen. What can go wrong? Color banding is even worse when a gradient that's supposed to be one color has to be green and blue in some brightnesses because there aren't enough colors.

I remember seeing ads in magazines and playing it on my SNES. Eh. Meh.

I have spanish magazines giving 95/100 score to this shit. The first time I played on my PC I thought it was bugged, but no...the game was just a turd.

I remember seeing this game being advertised at a local flea market at the time. They had a big cardboard cutout of the protagonist "Coton" and were showcasing the PC version. The graphics were impressive and still kinda are in this video. I never played the game, though, as my computer was too shit. Never heard a peep about this game shortly after that.

Fucking brilliant video, really amazing and interesting. I wonder if in the west it was not so heavily advertized? I barely remember hearing much about htis game aside from some vague articles in mag here or there. I remember seeing somehting like Eternal Champions advertized way more.

We're 'lucky' that the arcade version is playable in MAME; neither of the two known arcade cabinets work. Interestingly there's also a version of Zool on the same/similar hardware but nobody has claimed to own a copy.

Did EDGE ever review it? (Great video BTW)

best episode, ty kim!

My only experience with Rise of Robots was a shareware demo on PC. Needless to say I never sought out a full version.

Some magazines survived and I bought those: namely PC Zone and PC Format. But yes, the Amiga magazine market was saturated at that time - so many, and I bought almost all of them every month! Madness!