RoboCop vs. The Terminator

At last, it's a RoboCop game worth playing. It turns out that all you need to do is add a heavy helping of Terminators and suddenly Detroid is worth fighting for. RoboCop vs. The Terminator is not just an obvious pairing, it's also a solid 2D action game with over-the-top violence, great graphics and all of the key elements from both blockbuster movies franchises.

RoboCop vs. The Terminator proposes that, in the future, Cyberdyne would use RoboCop's tech to build Skynet. I don't remember Arnold Schwarzenegger mentioning any of this to John Connor, but I'm willing to go with it. From there the plot resembles that of Terminator 2, with Skynet sending an army of Terminators back to the past in order to stop a series of events from taking place. Now it's up to RoboCop to beat back the Terminator scourge and defeat the Skynet CPU.


About half the game involves Robo fighting through the streets of Detroit, the construction site for Delta City and OCP headquarters. After an extended fight with ED-209 (OCP's murderous automated robot tank), Robo is thrown underground to deal with the incoming army of terminators. Eventually he makes his way to Skynet and attempts to solve this problem once and for all. But it's not easy going; our hero will have to fight a fleet of annoying robots in order to avert a wide scale takeover.

Much like other RoboCop and Terminator titles, the gameplay is relatively simple. You can jump around and use a large variety of cool guns. What you lack in variety you more than make up in firepower. Robo has access to grenade throwers, missile launchers, shut guns and more. Best of all, he is able to alternate between two guns at the push of a button.


RoboCop vs. The Terminator is a good looking game, especially if you're the kind of person who loves watching thugs explode into a puddle of blood. The deaths in this game are especially gory, perfectly keeping in line with his ultra-violent first film (which originally received an X-rating from the MPAA). And just in case the gore explosion wasn't enough for you, there's actually a cheat code to add even more gruesome violence to the mix.

The game does suffer from a few disappointing gameplay decisions. For one thing, the game's bosses are far too difficult. Although you can pick up bigger and better guns, it's easy to lose them and be stuck with your regular old pea shooter. Fighting the ED-209 took close to ten minutes, much too long for this kind of fast-paced action game.


RoboCop doesn't have a lot of time for introspect. There's never any mention about him struggling to be a robot and not a man, or that he's living in a world where nobody notices that private corporations seem to be running the government. Instead he's too busy killing robots from the future. It would have been nice to see a cinema or two between stages, if only to set up the context and keep players engaged.

Forget Freddy vs. Jason and Alien vs. Predator, this Genesis game is the match-up I've been dying to see. RoboCop vs. The Terminator suffers from a few common 16-bit problems, but that shouldn't affect your enjoyment of this exciting crossover. The graphics are good, the gameplay is responsive and it's as gory as Mortal Kombat. I'd buy that for a dollar!