Previous Next

Robocop, eh, what a film? Unexpected hit of the year in 1987, not that I would know, being underage to see such an 18-rated film. It would later be released on video though. The old VHS cassette tape format that is.

Oh, those were the days of quality action movies, Predator, Die Hard, Robocop, The Untouchables, Full Metal Jacket and erm... Teen Wolf Too. They said that underage kids watching 18-rated films would scar them for life. Well it did no harm to us, we're all perfectly fine psychologically balanced individuals, well most of us, well one of us, maybe. I must admit though that there were some extremely violent scenes that even my desensitised brain found hard to watch.

Nevertheless, the film did extremely well and all sorts of merchandise sprang up as a result. One particular merchandising of relevance to us was the arcade and home computer games. It could be said that Ocean had bought the Robocop licence long before it became a huge hit. This would be true as Ocean had a habit of buying all sorts of film and TV rights at the time. Remember these games? Batman, Cobra, Darkman, Highlander, Hudson Hawk, Knight Rider, Miami Vice, Night Breed, Platoon, Rambo 1 & 3, Red Heat, Short Circuit, Terminator 2, Top Gun, Total Recall, The Untouchables and erm... V. Some of these were even good, there's no denying that, but no one was quite expecting the huge phenomenon that was the Robocop game.

Ocean had the Amstrad CPC, C64, Spectrum, Amiga and ST versions ready for release at the same time as the home video release. The video even had an advertisement for the video game before the main film. Games magazines started featuring the game in their reviews pages and all versions got a warm reception, scoring high percentages. With a hit film behind the licence, great marketing skills and a great game to back up all the hype, how could they go wrong? It couldn't.

Despite the lack of an AA review, the game shot to the top of the charts and stayed there longer than Bryan Adams stayed at the top of the music charts. In fact, it wouldn't disappear until nearly two years after its initial release.

The CPC game itself, as were all the 8-bit versions, is a curious mixture of side scrolling shoot-'em-up and puzzle subgames, which worked well. Graphics are colourful and well defined with smooth scrolling across the levels. Sound is pretty non-existent except for the great title soundtrack and sampled speech: which reads out the prime directives. The all-important gameplay, while slightly difficult and frustrating in places, is playable and the sub-games added variety to the proceedings. The hostage sub-game is particularly fiddly as well as difficult.

The only annoyance with the cassette version was the multi-load levels. This involved the next level loading from tape, and if you died you would have to rewind the tape and re-load the first level. But to be fair, most games were using this practice at the time. A great game all the same, and Ocean must have thought so too as they followed the same game style for virtually every film licence since.

The impressive-looking sequel was released on cartridge only and boasted some great graphics and soundtracks. Again the same difficult gameplay was cited as the major failing of the game. Despite this the game received a healthy 94% rating back in AA66.

Complete the first level

Graphics 89%
P. Colourful sprites
P. Movement is smooth enough

Sound 77%
P. Some great speech samples
N. No in-game effects

Grab Factor 92%
P. The licence alone will intrigue you enough to give it a go

Staying Power 82%
P. Challenging gameplay
P. Varied mix of levels

Overall 84%
An all-round decent package, hampered slightly by a tough difficulty setting.