YMMV / Rise of the Robots

• Anticlimax Boss: The Supervisor is just as, if not more than, susceptible to the corner-and-kick technique as most of the other opponents, making it very easy to beat her without taking a single hit.
• Awesome Music: The soundtrack was promoted with Blatant Lies—Brian May's name was mentioned prominently on the packaging, but he only contributed one very short (but awesome) tune for the game. The rest of the soundtrack wasn't even rock; it was techno by Richard Joseph. Yet interestingly enough, Joseph's tunes are actually quite good in their own right, and hold up quite well many years later. Check out Loader, Builder, and Supervisor.
• Game-Breaker: Most fights in single player can be won by just backing your opponent into a corner and kicking them to death.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The Game Over screen telling the player FORGET YOU comes off as a Precision F-Strike nowadays thanks to Cee Lo Green.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The Genesis game over music.
  • The 3DO It's a Wonderful Failure scenes can qualify as well. While some of them are mundane and even funny due to their Special Effect Failure and Soundtrack Dissonance, a few stand out as being surprisingly shocking or gory - particularly in the Eye Scream department. The game over screen has a loud guitar riff, showing Cyborg go limp as his exposed eye rolls up in its socket, while the Sentry's animation has him crushing Cyborg's decapitated head into scrap metal, crushing the eye within. The Supervisor has this one as well, decapitating Cyborg and skewering his head in a surprisingly gory fashion and gouging out one eye. For some, the subpar CG of the cutscenes end up making these scenes even more unnerving.
  • The arcade version left those animations found on the 3DO in, as well as others that were not shown in the 3DO, as the arcade version was the version where every opponent is playable, and thus leading to different scenarios, such as the Sentry crushing the decapitated head of different opponents. For another instance, the Crusher has one unique animation where he snips off the loser's head, and even that has a variation if the opponent is the Sentry or the Military, where, after the loser's head is snipped off, the camera zooms in on the Crusher while he is looking at you. And if that's not enough, the Supervisor has different ways of finishing off her opponents, such as kicking off the Military's head, or even shattering the upper half of the Sentry's body. Even then, if the Sentry is the one to win against the Supervisor, he shatters her entirely with a single spin kick, leading to a situation where in the cutscene that follows, she rises no worse for wear, but then shatters again.
• Obvious Beta: While Rise is somewhat playable, and Rise 2 being more so, there seems to be some unfinished elements of Rise 2, such as certain characters not having certain animations, nor having said animations match up with their actions. The Necroborg is a blatant example of this.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: It's hard to talk about this game without mentioning the massive disconnect between its earliest review scores and the actual product's quality, which destroyed public trust in British gaming magazines.
• Padding: The 3DO port forces you to fight the first three opponents twice for no reason other than to extend the game's length.
• Porting Disaster: Considering this game was all about the graphics and music, there were some platforms that shouldn't have even been considered for a port. In particular, the handheld versions featured ugly, blotchy sprites on top of the terrible gameplay.
  • To give some examples, the Super Nintendo version had a great techno track and graphics, but lacking everywhere else. The Genesis version had it worse thanks to its music quality (and the Game Gear version was even sloppier). The Amiga version, while great graphically, has no music at all, and comes on 13 floppy disks. You change multiple disks just getting past the intro - which, obviously, can't be skipped.
  • The PC version of Rise 2 was more robust, but the rig required was pretty powerful and rare for its time. The PS1 port lacked some graphical details.
  • The 3DO really has it all: No music, wonky controls, cheating AI, the aforementioned Padding, and it hard locks on the title screen after a Game Over.
• So Bad, It's Good: The first game. Heavy controls, shallow gameplay, broken multiplayer, the characters were well detailed but feel like they were copied and pasted over the colorful yet lifeless backgrounds. And despite all that, it's a pretty fun-to-play game, as seeing how the AI backs off to the corner and waits for the player to kick it to death is hilarious. The techno music of the SNES version is pretty catchy (despite not being by Brian May), and the cinematics introducing the droids (Again, in the SNES version) are surprisingly well done and spectacular.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: Rise 2: Resurrection had a much wider range of characters, more moves for each, somewhat improved controls, and a number of other fixes. On top of that, you can freely pick your characters this time. Unfortunately, it wasn't good enough to get over the bad memories of the first.
• That One Boss: The Crusher is easily the most broken character in the first game, with a really long reach (while still attacking just as quickly as any other opponent) and a wonky hitbox on its jump attack allowing it to hit you when it shouldn't be able to. It's also one of the few opponents in the game where the "Back your opponent into a corner and kick them to death" strategy doesn't work (although really this shouldn't be the case in a game touting intelligent AI anyway).
  • Supervisor can swiftly become this as nearly every single move she has is gigantic, disjointed and assured to take off between a third and HALF of your health bar in one hit. Due to her small size she can sometimes squeak out of the corner kicking cycle and retaliate in a flash, sometimes taking the entire round back from you in a blink.

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