Robocop review (Xbox)

Despite the two-year-plus development cycle, Robocop is a buggy mess, filled with loads of unbelievably obvious issues that somehow dodged their way through the QA process. The biggest of these issues involves collision detection, which might as well not even exist half the time. Enemies will frequently just waltz right through walls and not think anything of it. Of course, while their gun is sticking through a wall, they have the ability to shoot you, but if you try to shoot back through the wall, your bullets magically bounce right off. Enemies also have an interesting habit of just totally spazzing out at times, depending on how close or in what position you're standing in relation to them. Sometimes moving too far over from their basic firing range will cause their torsos to start spinning around and around like a demon-possessed whirling dervish, and they won't stop spinning until you move that extra inch over to the right. Also, in practically any mission where you have to rescue hostages, if you wander up to a wall on the opposite side of the room where the hostage is positioned, and you press the "rescue" button while facing that wall, you can rescue the hostage without ever having to walk into the room and face any of the bad guys.

When it comes to graphics, Robocop just doesn't look good at all. Every environment in the game is drab, ugly, and extremely poorly textured. Save for a few of the more rare and more difficult baddies, such as the infamous ED-209 and the giant sewer rat that shows up at one point (though we haven't figured out why), the rest of the game's bad guys look like a bunch of Final Fight rejects, with every cheap and generic physical attribute you can think of for a gang member. The Robocop model itself actually looks pretty good, though since the game is a first-person shooter, you rarely ever see it, except in the few cutscenes that present themselves. The game's sound is of even worse quality, especially when it comes to the audio mixing. Much of the cutscene dialogue is extremely quiet, and you'll have to turn up your TV pretty loud to hear what's going on--but moments later you'll be grabbing the remote as the blazingly loud gunshots start going off as the mission begins. Robocop is apparently voiced by whatever developer on the game drew the short straw, and he couldn't muster up even a decent Robocop impression. Additionally, never once does Robocop utter one of his famous one-liners; instead, we're treated to a number of lame exclamations like "Oh yeah!" and "Prepare to meet your maker!" which sound completely ludicrous coming out of a supposedly emotionless machine.

Every single aspect of Robocop feels like it was thrown together at the last minute, and the end result is a game that, for all intents and purposes, is just no fun at all. Even if you're a fan of the Robocop franchise, you'd be infinitely better off just watching any of the movies (yes, even Robocop 3), rather than paying full retail price for a shoddy product like Robocop for the Xbox.