Your Weekly Kusoge

It is appropriate that a fighting game based on Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots is a complete button masher. The combat is lacking in moves and opponents have weak AI with no difficulty settings. To actually win a round, a QTE prompt is triggered once the health bar has depleted. The objective is to press the shoulder buttons alternately and fast. By that, I should say the poor buttons take an excessive pounding that can only further be explained as the same abuse the joystick took in Mario Party on N64. It is a strange moment in the game. You see some crazy red "KO" text plastered in the background with blaring rock music. It is quite a mindless display of stuggle and possibly one of the longest to break one's neck in a video game (especially the classic "pez" fatality).

Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots

Conceptually the premise of fighting robots makes sense, however, Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots is just not well thought out. There is no multiplayer to be found, which conflict with the original toy design. For fans of the original toy there is a classic mode you can play Red vs Blue matches, or you can simply pick versus mode that is the same exact thing but with additional colored characters. These colored characters have unique portraits but are literally different palattes of the same robot sprite. The adaptation would need some bells and whistles to expand with. As it turns out, the toy is just not that compelling to hold its own as a full game title. Especially not a single player variant of it.