If you're going to make a dirty, dirty port of Robotron: 2084 for high-end handsets, like the Sony Ericsson S710, the least you could do is include all 255 waves of mind-bending chaos. Instead, Robotron for mobile features 10 short waves of action and a maximum possible score of around 20,000. The game's technical performance is similarly inadequate. Robotron 2084 won't satisfy the joystick junkies of old, or really anyone.
Before The Matrix or even The Terminator, there was Robotron. In the game, a race of service robots are revolting against their former human masters. As the last hope for humanity, it's your job to gun down as many of these malevolent machines as possible, while saving any humans in the vicinity. Certain robots can even roboticize your comrades, turning them into dangerous "progs."
In the arcade version of the game, players used one joystick to move and one to fire. These controls have been remapped to phone keypads and navigation pads. Using both sets of controls simultaneously takes some getting used to, especially on the skewed keys of the S710, and it's never quite as easy as you would hope. Even still, you may well make it through the game's paltry 10 waves on your first try.
Robotron at least looks good and runs well...until you turn on the sound. Whenever one of the game's classic sounds is played, the gameplay slows almost to a complete halt. So, if you want to make the facile first 10 waves even easier, toggle the sound on and fire a lot. The robots will be sitting ducks. Again, this game is 23 years old, so there's no reason why it shouldn't run perfectly on a top-end handset, even given the fact that it's being emulated in Java. If you want to enjoy this small dose of Robotron the way it was intended to be played, you'll be unable to turn on the sound, period.
Robotron: 2084 is a sloppy, incomplete port that's not worth your mobile dollar. Here's proof that not all retro game ports are made equally.
