Robotron: 2084 might just be the single coolest arcade game I've played for sooo many different reasons. The visuals are especially impressive to me with the absolute cacophony of flashing lights and colours set to a flat black background being such a great way to convey the neon lit hellscape in which everything takes place. Basically everything demands the player's direct attention just from a purely visual standpoint, and are crafted in such a way that even at a glance you can tell where things are despite the maelstrom of clashing and intersecting explosions and shapes darting across the screen. It's also another case where the utterly brutal difficulty you could come to expect from a game at the time felt pretty interestingly contextualised within the tone and narrative of the game itself, which is always neat, not to mention that the tone itself is unbelievably bleak.
The game is set after a robot uprising that renders basically all of humanity dead, but rather than being a story of trying to do what you can to restore hope, everything is more akin to a desperate scramble just to maybe cling onto your life for a bit longer. There is no hope here, only doing what you can to extend your own life and that of the last remaining human family for that extra bit of time solely for the sake of not wanting to die, and in the end, it's pointless, there's no winning, just endless waves of increasingly aggressive and twisted death robots all desiring little more than your destruction. I also really like the pacing of the game and the way this further ties into these ideas, as rather than a more typical formula you'd come to expect where it takes a bit to get going and reach the tricky stuff that'll kill you, extra lives usually being a huge milestone in terms of score, this game throws you into the deep end and you just need to adapt to the chaos as quickly as possible. Extra lives are so common that by the 10th wave (each lasting at most 30 seconds) you'll probably have gained at least 4 extra lives as long as you've been playing well, but even if this it's likely that you'll have died by then enough times to not even see what awaits you.
I feel like this further contributes to the bleak desperation of the situation the player finds themselves in where there are so many situations where rather than even thinking about "how am I going to beat this huge wave?" you instead immediately start considering if it's possible to score enough for another extra life so you can inevitably get torn to shreds one more time and hold off the enemies for another few moments. It's definitely a unique take on this type of game to use lives as almost an active resource where it'll be a bit of a tempo reset if you die and put you back into a more advantageous position momentarily rather than simply being there to count the amount of mistakes you make. Obviously you still never really want to die in this game at any point, but it seems like the game gears it more towards each individual death not really being especially catastrophic. It all culminates in an awesome little time that I've been playing on and off for a while now, and while there are certain frustrating elements such as the game being obscenely fast with some erratic bullet patterns being practically impossible to dodge, the whole experience is something that I think is really impressive and engaging, especially with some absolutely amazing art direction backing it all up.
The game is set after a robot uprising that renders basically all of humanity dead, but rather than being a story of trying to do what you can to restore hope, everything is more akin to a desperate scramble just to maybe cling onto your life for a bit longer. There is no hope here, only doing what you can to extend your own life and that of the last remaining human family for that extra bit of time solely for the sake of not wanting to die, and in the end, it's pointless, there's no winning, just endless waves of increasingly aggressive and twisted death robots all desiring little more than your destruction. I also really like the pacing of the game and the way this further ties into these ideas, as rather than a more typical formula you'd come to expect where it takes a bit to get going and reach the tricky stuff that'll kill you, extra lives usually being a huge milestone in terms of score, this game throws you into the deep end and you just need to adapt to the chaos as quickly as possible. Extra lives are so common that by the 10th wave (each lasting at most 30 seconds) you'll probably have gained at least 4 extra lives as long as you've been playing well, but even if this it's likely that you'll have died by then enough times to not even see what awaits you.
I feel like this further contributes to the bleak desperation of the situation the player finds themselves in where there are so many situations where rather than even thinking about "how am I going to beat this huge wave?" you instead immediately start considering if it's possible to score enough for another extra life so you can inevitably get torn to shreds one more time and hold off the enemies for another few moments. It's definitely a unique take on this type of game to use lives as almost an active resource where it'll be a bit of a tempo reset if you die and put you back into a more advantageous position momentarily rather than simply being there to count the amount of mistakes you make. Obviously you still never really want to die in this game at any point, but it seems like the game gears it more towards each individual death not really being especially catastrophic. It all culminates in an awesome little time that I've been playing on and off for a while now, and while there are certain frustrating elements such as the game being obscenely fast with some erratic bullet patterns being practically impossible to dodge, the whole experience is something that I think is really impressive and engaging, especially with some absolutely amazing art direction backing it all up.