Dig Dug is one of the best arcade games of all time. I'd put it in the holy Namco trilogy alongside Galaga and Ms. Pac-man. But what sets it apart from so many other arcade classics is that you can be mildly skilled and still make it several levels on one try. Dig Dug has always felt like less of a quarter guzzler than its peers; that along with the unique character designs, memorable music & sound, and satisfying digging/air pump-based combat make it seem like a lot of care was put into Dig Dug. Everyone should play it once. Thankfully it has been ported to all modern platforms.

It's not the worst but it very much feels like oblivion with all the charm removed and it's so bizarre to have this take place after 2 as opposed to making it closer to when the bombs dropped. I like how oppressive it is in some places but it's equal parts just sort of boring and sad. It's more about traditional dungeon crawling than all the other games and it gets that right in some points but it makes you resent everything that isn't just mindlessly gunning down mutants in tunnels. All the NPCs are very flat and the ones that are supposed to be goofy are somehow even more robotic. I replayed this a month ago and I was struck by how much I could barely remember any actual town, companion or questline.

Gets a lot more mileage than you'd expect out of a more mid budget title but it has the 7th gen linear shooter problem where every time you feel like the action has reached it's logical conclusion the game has like 2-4 more hours where the only escalation is the enemies getting spongier.

Combat is great for the first 4 hours where almost every gunfight feels like one from the movies, it plays a lot with vertical space and where enemies can pop up. Also one of the only shooters I've seen get vehicle enemies right. But after you take out the biker gang hideout the game runs out of ideas and just sort of throws in a bunch of different bullet sponge robots and swat teams that will prove tedious even if you're minmaxing in all the ways the game wants you to. By the end of the game you have an infinite ammo machine pistol you never have to reload and combat devolves into holding down the left mouse button until the slow mo effect signifying you've killed everyone comes up.

The game looks gorgeous and it's probably the only convincing use of UE5 I've seen (you could reasonably show any frame of just robocop from this game and someone would probably think its from the movie) but lowering it to anywhere below ultra (its summer, my room is hot enough already without my rig being a heater!) leaves it looking very scuffed. A good tech demo and benchmarker but otherwise very ugly when playable. All of the props, menus and environments are entirely film accurate to a commendable extent (ED-209 even moves like a stop motion effect in some scenes) but overall it doesn't feel very much like the movie even with Peter Weller returning.

Most dialogue scenes are stilted and slow and entirely lacking score. No one talks over each other or argues and it just gives the overall effect of being stuck in a Mass Effect style strict dialogue system. This is because the game is relatively non linear and has a bunch of sidequests about going around arresting punks and helping citizens, which is somewhat of a fun bit at the beginning when you get to play beat cop but over time just gives the impression the game is extremely confused about what it wants to do. I would've much rather taken a 4 hour hand crafted experience with pacing similar to one of the movies as opposed to a 10 hour one with most of the time taken up by dead eyed fish people flapping their lips about how Robocop needs to go to therapy or whatever.