Votoms the Battling Road, for SNES

Rating: 4.0/10; Below Average

Battling Road is a 3rd person mech shooter where it is obvious they took a half assed idea for a simple multiplayer game and tried to stretch it out into a full game. Stages alternate between simple 3D arenas and more traditional vertical scrolling shoot em up. The 2 vertical scrolling stages are the best part of the game but are very simple compared to proper shoot em ups. Shoot the enemies with your slow moving projectiles without any kind of Crosshair while moving side to side to avoid theirs. Then beat the boss. At least in this phase the enemies don't have a truck load of hit points and take forever to kill. Such is not the case in the arena battles. You go up against three enemies at a time; sometimes new ones come in to replace those that are destroyed and sometimes it is a one-on-one boss fight. The controls are terrible with you only able to go forwards or backwards like a car, as if the legs on your mech are entirely useless. Left and right allow you to turn slowly while the shoulder buttons allow you to turn quickly, which is the winning strategy because the enemies are unable to perform these tight turns.

It is not difficult to get behind the enemies once you get proficient with the controls. You get 3 weapons: the punch is difficult to use with the way your mech will bounce back after touching enemies and it is difficult to stay lined up. The only good thing about the punch is that it causes enemies to want to move out of your face. The infinite ammo machine gun is the most useful weapon but the projectiles travel so slowly that you need to significantly lead the target and fire constantly so you can actually aim. The last weapon is a lock on homing missile which has limited ammo. The game would be more fun with more missiles or better weapons, but it is instead a tedious slog of trying to stay behind enemies, slowly whittling their health down and going after the missile launcher ones first, because those are the only real threat to your massive hp pool.

The game is very short, which can be considered a blessing given how boring the gameplay is. The game fails to introduce new mechanics as stages progress and thus fails to stay fresh. The only good thing I can say about the gameplay is that I was slightly impressed at how the bosses would try to get me to run into the landmines. Otherwise the story has good art. I cannot read Japanese though so I have no idea how good it is. This game is a complete waste of time to play and really needed more compelling gameplay.