‘Robo Army ACA NEOGEO’ Review – Not Quite Scrap Metal
We looked at Burning Fight ($3.99) a few weeks ago. It was one of SNK's early attempts to make a hit beat-em-up on its new NEOGEO platform. It almost stole directly from Capcom's Final Fight, and the lack of a unique theme may have been what hurt it in the end. Well, Robo Army ($3.99) can't be accused of not being its own thing. Robot warriors that can beat their robot enemies with their own arms and sometimes turn into cars for a while? Yes, I think SNK was the first to use that well.
It's a story that has been told since the beginning of games. A crazy scientist makes an army of robots and tries to take over the world. Mega Man must be busy, because two robot warriors have been sent to take care of the mad scientist and free the people he has captured. They'll have to fight their way through the mad scientist's robo army, which is made up of different kinds of robots. There are six stages in total, and each one takes you to a different dirty place. Unlike many other beat-em-up games, you don't get to choose who you play as. Player 1 is always Red Guy With A Human Face, and Player 2 is always Blue Guy With A Robot Face.
Robo Army was made by a lot of the same people who made Art of Fighting and Fatal Fury, but it's not nearly as ambitious as those games. When you get past the theme, Robo Army is about as simple a brawler as you can find. You have some basic attack combos, a back attack, a jump, and a special move button that does different things depending on how full your special gauge is. You can grab an enemy and do more damage to it at the same time. When you kill an enemy, they may leave behind their arms or pipes, which you can use as weapons. You'll also find health and energy pickups, as well as a special item that turns you into an unstoppable car that can run over enemies.
This is pretty much all there is to it. Robo Army, a NEOGEO game from 1991, is surprisingly free of gimmicky ways to show off how powerful the hardware is. When things come in from the background, you might see a scaling sprite, but most of the NEOGEO's power is used to keep things moving smoothly with a lot of characters, some of which are big. The graphics aren't too bad, and the sounds are fun, like when you scrape your metal fists against the metal jaws of your enemies. It's not a particularly rich game for its time, but it does the job. Your hits feel a little more powerful than they did in Burning Fight, and the fact that your enemies break apart when you hit them helps sell your hits. There are also some funny animations, like when a car-robot decides to bite you with its hood.
Robot Army is a perfectly good beat-em-up, and if the theme appeals to you, you'll find it a fun game to play every now and then. But it never goes much further than that, and hitting a robot in the head with its friend's arm will get old after a while. A very long time, to be sure. I mean, that is just too funny. I wouldn't be surprised if the whole game was given the go-ahead on just that part of the pitch. But eventually that thrill will go away, and all you'll be left with is a brawler on par with Jaleco that has more sound effects of pans banging together. Something good enough to put a few quarters in while you wait for your clothes to dry, but not good enough to remember after you've folded them.
The good thing about Hamster, though, is that the company cares about games like that as well as the big hits. I've done a lot of these reviews by now, but I've never really stopped to say how nice it is to see SNK and Hamster branching out from the usual hits that get mobile ports. In the past, SNK would have made Metal Slugs, King of Fighters, Samurai Shodown, and a few other random games, and that would have been it. In fact, they did that very thing. We now live in a world where some really obscure games that not many people care about are getting high-quality releases, which I think is great for both presentation and variety.
By now, everyone knows what these games' packages look like and how they work. Controller support? Yes, and that means that local multiplayer will be supported. Check. Save states. There are many ways to change the video, audio, level of difficulty, and controls. It has the usual Caravan and Score Attack modes, as well as online leaderboards. There are versions of the game for Japan and other places. This is one of those games where you can play just fine with the touch controls if you don't have a separate controller. I'll make my usual complaint about not being able to play multiplayer games online, but that's about all I have to say about how Hamster runs things.
You won't have a bad time with Robo Army if you want to add another average beat-em-up to your collection, have fond memories of Nick Arcade, or just have to get all of the ACA NEOGEO games. It has a fun theme that is well done, which helps to hide the fact that it is just a simple game. It works fine on mobile, and I can't say enough about how you can pick up robot arms and use them to beat up other robots. If that's not worth $4, I don't know what is.
