Rise of the Robots (Super Nintendo) Review
The hype-train derailed when Rise of the Robots landed.
~by tankMage (September 2026)
Score: 50/100 (Bad)
Rise of the Robots commits the ultimate video game sin by being boring. And I’m not talking about the comfy kind of boring that makes you nod off on a rainy day. No, Rise of the Robots is boring in an annoying, soul sucking kind of way. Combat is tedious and feels horrible. The graphics are ugly despite being what would have been considered high tech back in the mid 1990s. To add insult to injury, there’s only one playable character in the story mode and he sucks; they even force one of the players to use the crappy main character in VS. mode. Why!?
Rise of the Robots feels like it was made in ignorance of what makes a fighting game enjoyable. Where other fighters offer thumb blistering action, this one drags painfully even though bouts are only a minute long. The only redeeming qualities of this title are the facts that it works (I mean that in the utilitarian sense that it doesn’t just randomly crash) and that some of the music is pretty good.
Here’s what really gets me: We live in a universe where Brian May, Queen’s guitarist, worked on a video game sound track, but it’s freaking Rise of the Robots! Clearly I’ve stumbled into a cursed reality.
Note: After doing some digging, I learned that Brian May is only loosely associated with Rise of the Robots. According to the internet, May was asked to write a sound track, but there were too many delays and they ended up releasing the game without using his work.
Story
The premise of Rise of the Robots is sort of interesting despite not making a lot of sense. However, the devs failed to utilize it effectively. Some mega corp decided to put a super smart robot in charge of their main production facility, which predictably ended badly when the super bot went haywire. In a sane world, they would just bomb the facility or send a bunch of marines in to clear the place out. None of the robots in this game have actual weapons, so I’m pretty sure a few squads of soldiers could clean the mess up pretty easily.
Logic doesn’t apply to Rise of the Robots, so instead of dealing with the problem in an easy or cheap way, the corporation decided to build a cyborg that is immune to the super bot’s influence. The process apparently took several attempts to perfect, which resulted in several human deaths and must have cost a fortune. Eventually, they got it right and sent the cyborg in to destroy the bad robots.
Right here we have an interesting twist because there isn’t really a hero. Electrocorp (the company that made the cyborg) doesn’t care about human life, they just want their factory back. Consequently, the cyborg can be viewed as a victim who is forced to fight for his evil masters. There were a million opportunities to present meaningful concepts and tell a tale where Cyborg struggles both physically and mentally, but they didn’t go that route. That said, there are some really pretentious games out there that try to do what I just described, so maybe it’s better the story is what it is.
The story goes off the rails when you apply it to a fighting game. You’d think they’d give the cyborg some kind of weapons to fight with, right? Nope. All Mr. Cyborg has at his disposal are his bare hands and feetsies. Just in case there was a shred of credibility left in the story, the devs made sure to attach this plot to a fighting game with timed matches which do not mesh well with the concept.
Fighting games almost always use a tournament scenario of some sort, because it makes sense to do so. The story and rules of Rise of the Robots imply that the crazy robots follow tournament rules for some reason. Imagine a super AI bent on conquering the world bowing out when its opponent fought slightly better than it did in an allotted amount of time. Why would it do that? Well, it wouldn’t, so the story makes zero sense. Also, these robots control a massive factory, couldn’t they make weapons of some sort? Whatever.
I usually don’t point out little inconsistencies in video game plots because I do not believe stories have to be watertight to be good. There are many times where characters die in other stories when they could easily be brought back with magic or instances where demons are invading the planet and the army is nowhere to be found. Usually the rest of the plot is consistent enough that you can just hand wave away a few contradictions or oversights. But it’s impossible to ignore this game’s logical inconsistencies. Trust me, I tried.
Don’t get excited for the ending if you’re interested in the world or the hero. Like everything else it’s disappointing. You basically get a pat on the back, then the crappy cutscenes for each enemy replay.
Basically, the story is dumb and you can’t make sense of it with any amount of mental gymnastics. I could think up ten better reasons to have a cyborg facing off against robots and most of them work a lot better than what they went with.
Graphics
Mirage Technologies must have really thought they were onto something when they came up with the visual design of this fighter. If you’re familiar with games like Donkey Kong Country, Super Mario RPG, and Killer Instinct, you’ll recognize the pre-rendered graphics used in Rise of the Robots. I have to give the devs some credit for creating a few cool looking characters and environments using a technique that was kind of new. On the same token, the graphics mostly suck.
First off, the animations could have used a few more frames. I’ve seen worse, but the movements of the characters, even the Cyborg who they should have put the most work into, are really choppy. I felt like I was watching a poorly done PNG animation on the internet back in 2004 while I was playing this. The little cutscenes that play before and after fights are even worse. They look like they are running at ten frames per second.
Speaking of the cutscenes, they are often too dim to see properly and do not really add anything meaningful to the game. A few of them are kind of cool in their own way, but they get old quickly and there’s one for every enemy. Luckily there aren’t very many foes, so you don’t have to sit through them for long.
Rise of the Robots could have used more polish in general. Fighters kind of just pop onto the screen at the start of each round and the damage effects are lame. When someone gets hit there’s a little puff that appears and some pieces of metal fly off whoever got hurt. The effects may look good on paper, but in practice they are too small and slow to be dramatic.
Special moves are also really lackluster. The cyborg does a shoulder slam, a flying headbutt, and a flying kick and that’s about it. No missiles, lasers, or anything cool and flashy that would have fit perfectly into a robot fighter. The opponents’ special moves are just as dull. In fact, the only reason I knew when a special move was performed was when I did the button input for it myself.
Some of the character models are good, while others were really rough. The cyborg, despite looking cool on the title screen, is really bland and unassuming…basically the opposite of what you want from a protagonist. However, I thought some of the bad guys were kind of cool. Particularly the gorilla robot from the second fight and the final boss, even though she is basically a ripoff of the T-1000 from Terminator 2. That said, a lot of the other machines look like junk. The military robot looks like a cross between an oven and a car, while the sentinel is a big red Transformer wannabe that clashes with the atmosphere of the rest of the world.
This game was lauded for its graphics, but I was not impressed when I rented it in 1994 and I’m certainly not impressed now. Sure, it’s cool to see pre-rendered sprites and pseudo-3D cutscenes on the SNES, but a lot of other games beat Rise to the punch and did a better job to boot.
Gameplay
I can forgive a lot. Bad graphics and a worse story won’t break a game as far as I’m concerned. It’s even possible for a game to be bad in a way that’s entertaining. Rise of the Robots, however, is a tedious and dull mess.
Players are only allowed to control the cyborg in the main story mode. He happens to be the absolute worst character in the lineup, which is pretty bad considering one of the enemies is a walking forklift. Everyone else has better reach and does more damage. Later on the enemies’ health bars are barely dented by the player’s attacks. I usually welcome a challenge, but I’m pretty sure they made the opponents so strong to make up for the garbage AI.
I was able to beat the game by finding an attack that worked, then spamming it until the time ran out or when the enemy collapsed. Some foes, like the sentinel near the end, are so stupid they completely miss the player with jump kicks. Admittedly, these were fairly common issues with this genre, but most games had ways of punishing players who try to spam the AI to death. Try playing Samurai Shodown and tell me how well spamming the same kick over and over without so much as moving works.
While Rise of the Robots may sound easy (because it is in many ways) the devs decided to make it the most painful experience possible by not giving the player any continues. If you lose two rounds against the same guy you get sent all the way back to the start. I had to go through the first few fights about seven times since the game didn’t give me a chance to learn my opponents. Also, there’s only six opponents, so the game is really short…though that’s a good thing seeing as how it’s so bad.
Fighting isn’t any fun either. There is no sense of tension in the action and special moves are lame. Most of the time the AI doesn’t know what to do and you can just keep kicking the enemy as it stupidly walks into your foot. Every so often, the game decides to suddenly fight back, which is when the massive damage output of your opponents comes into play and sends you back to square one in defeat.
Most matches ended in a timeout for me because the cyborg does so little damage. Consequently, fights boiled down to crouching in the corner, blocking, and kicking. You can do one of the cyborg’s underwhelming moves, like the headbutt or shoulder slam, but this often opens you up to an attack that deals way more damage to you than you did to the enemy.
The final boss is pretty much the culmination of everything wrong with this game. The entire fight was just me chipping away at its health while hoping it didn’t land too many attacks. This may sound fun, but it’s more of a double bind you have to get through by relying on luck and spammy moves than a situation that requires strategy or skill. You can’t effectively block the last boss because she does huge damage through the cyborg’s defenses and dodging is an iffy proposition, so you just hop around or crouch like a madman in hopes that you land enough blows. If you time it right, you can even get her to loop like all the other foes who just walk into your kicks, but it’s a bit tougher with her since her attacks trigger from a greater range than anyone else.
Well made fighting games have a subtlety to them that is completely absent from Rise of the Robots. Instead of learning tells, setting up combos, and getting good at pulling off special moves, this fighter has players cheesing their opponents to death in hopes of winning when the timer runs down. I can’t think of a worse way to make a fighting game. Even Time Killers requires more from the player and has slightly better AI. I know I’m repeating myself, but I’m just shocked at how badly they scuffed the AI.
Two player mode is no better. You can choose from nearly all of the characters in VS Mode, which sounds like an improvement until you realize Player 1 MUST be the cyborg. This means the second player can pick pretty much any other robot and have a huge advantage. Why they thought this was a good idea is beyond me. It’s probably the dumbest, most unfair way to set up a two player mode. Ironically, it would have been better to just restrict both players to the cyborg, at least then it’s a fair fight.
It’s hard to communicate just how dull and painful Rise of the Robots is in words. It’s one of those things that have to be experienced like kidney stones or having your fingernails peeled off with pliers. Ok, both of those things are objectively worse than playing this title, though I will say Rise is the digital equivalent to torture.
User Interface
One would expect the controls to be the main culprit in making this game so unpleasant. While they are a bit mushy, the controls aren’t all that bad. If anything, they’re laid out on a convenient and logical manner. It’s also fairly easy to input button combos for special moves. You can even skip the crappy cutscenes, so uh, good job Mirage.
Music and Sound
One of the most heinous acts in video game history is centered around the sound track for this title. As the story goes, the devs really liked Brian May’s album, Back to the Light. Being the lead guitar player for Queen, Brian May is kind of a big deal as Ron Burgundy would say, so it’s really cool that he agreed to do the sound track for Rise of the Robots when Mirage Technologies approached him. According to legend, Brian May took too long to produce the sound track, so Mirage simply digitized one of the tracks from Back to the Light and brought in someone else to do the rest of the music. They even kept May’s name on the box.
I get that Mirage probably had deadlines and financial obligations hanging over their heads, but even so, they could have given Brian May more time. After all, it was Mirage who approached May, not the other way around.
Now I have to give Mirage the benefit of a doubt. What you just read is an internet story that may or may not be true. Unless there’s an interview I couldn’t find floating around out there, we’ll never know what really happened. If the story is true, Mirage made one of the dumbest and most rude moves in game development history. They could have had an amazing sound track and even released a companion CD with May that would have likely done well since a rockstar making a video game BGM was a novelty at the time. All they had to do was give the man time to finish the sound track. In fact, Rise could have spent a few more months in development anyway.
As for the soundtrack itself, it’s pretty good. Into the Dark, the only actual Brian May track that was used, sounds really cool. The rest of the music is also good, though it’s nothing special. It’s the sort of early techno music that one would expect from something like this. However, it’s not worth playing Rise of the Robots just to hear the soundtrack, which you can simply listen to in a million places now.
As for the sound effects, well, they’re awful. All of them sound like someone is kicking a trashcan at the end of a long hallway. OK, that’s not fair, some of the effects remind me of a tool bag falling down some stairs, so there’s some variety. Either way, they suck and Mirage would have done better to just use whatever stock effects were built into the SNES.
Final Thoughts
Rise of the Robots is just plain bad. I rented it upon release many years ago. At the time it was hyped up in gaming mags quite a bit. The cool graphics (which looked a lot better in screenshots) and the fact that a famous musician was associated with the game made me curious. In fact, I was ready to buy Rise, but was astonished at how horrendous the gameplay was the moment the first fight began. Fights seemed to drag out forever while I tried to chip down the health bars of enemies that had more reach and power than my guy. At the same time, it was easy to catch opponents in loops that simply would not have happened in better fighters. Disgusted, I took my rented copy of Rise back to the game store the next day. The guy at the counter even asked about it and I informed him that it sucked.
Over the years I’ve found that some of the games I hated were actually alright or even good once I figured them out. This is not the case with Rise of the Robots. If anything, it’s worse than I remember. It’s one thing to rent this game, play it for fifteen minutes, then take it back to the shop, it’s something else entirely to sit with it for hours while replaying the same fights to beat it. The former experience is disappointing, the latter is just painful.
There’s no shortage of fighting games for SNES. Most of them are far better than Rise of the Robots. The only game that may be worse (that I know of) is Pit-Fighter. Regardless, there is no reason to play this stinker…unless you happen to be the sort of gamer who inflicts bad games on themselves for whatever reason. For everyone else, Rise of the Robots should be avoided.
The story isn’t over yet, remember how I said Rise was really hyped? Apparently it sold enough copies to justify a sequel. That’s right, Mirage made a follow-up that appeared on the next generation of consoles, but that’s something I’ll have to get around to later on if I can muster the willpower to try it.
Thanks for reading my Rise of the Robots review!
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