James Pond 2: Codename Robocod – Vectordean - 1991 - First time playing?: No, played as a kid, but hadn't beaten until now.

I imagine the above image is a POV shot of what you see when you commit tax evasion and the IRS sends their best trained operative to break down your wall and steal your lunch money. It’s beautiful. It’s so friendly and so threatening all at once. Look at how swole that fish is, I am convinced he could break my shins. I even set the wallpaper on my desktop computer to this image. Now every morning, as I drowsily climb onto my computer chair and turn on my PC, it’s Robocod breaking through my monitor that jolts me awake.

This is a game in which you play as a stretchy cyborg secret agent fish and you need to save Christmas. There we go, summed up as much as I can about the story without resorting to parroting more puns from the manual such as “licence to gill” or “double bubble seven”. The Bond parody angle thankfully doesn't really go much further than the title of the game and the associated puns in the manual, with the game itself instead having more of a cutesy surreal atmosphere that stands on its own, as opposed to Gex style parody. James Pond doesn't even have a gun, in spite of him posing with one on the Amiga version's box art. We dodged a bullet with this game coming out before voice acting was a commonly implemented aspect of video games. If Pond could talk I have no doubt that he wouldn't hesitate to shower us in even more wordplay based around James Bond and Robocop. Guess you could call him The Man With The Golden Pun? I regret writing that immediately.

While this game was critically acclaimed at the time of its release, especially on the Amiga, nowadays on the internet this game’s reputation is decidedly more mixed. See, on one hand it's called James Pond 2: Codename Robocod, but on the other hand it's called James Pond 2: Codename Robocod. I kinda love it, it's so corny and lame that it doesn't even sound like a real game, it sounds like the kind of thing you'd see the box of in the background of a cartoon or something, right next to the Meat Beat Mania arcade cabinet from Steven Universe. However, this also sounds like the video game equivalent of Sherlock Gnomes, which doesn't inspire much hope about the quality of the game. Ironically bad puns are literally the name of the game here and I can assure you that all of your friends will question your judgement if you choose to play a game called James Pond 2: Codename Robocod. I was going to review Langrisser and then I decided this game was a higher priority.

In all honesty, the game's not bad though. Well, there's a few caveats. Actually, quite a lot of caveats. Okay, by the time I finally beat it I was sick and tired of Robocod and swore that I hated this stupid fish game. There's still some really good ideas and interesting design here that I genuinely really enjoy though, and I do believe that the game is at least worth a look for retro platforming fans. My thoughts on the game are about as mixed as its online reputation, I suppose.

Robocod at a glance is a very formulaic platformer. You run around and jump on the heads of enemies to defeat them, while exploring levels and hitting floating blocks in the sky to reveal the items hidden inside them, just like Mario. Movement is responsive and feels good. You have a nice amount of control over your jumps thanks to being able to manoeuvre in mid air with the d-pad and control your jump height by the duration you hold down the jump button for, so it's got the most rudimentary basics down for a solid platforming foundation. Where things make a more interesting turn however is with the stretch mechanic. By holding either the A or C buttons you can have Pond infinitely stretch out his torso like a rubberhose cartoon character, allowing him to reach even greater vertical heights than his jump allows for.

Credit where credit is due, I absolutely adore this mechanic. This isn’t even an ironic “haha it’s so silly” type of adoration, I genuinely think this stretchy Inspector Gadget nonsense is brilliantly implemented, versatile, unique, appropriate for the genre and design of the game as a whole, and most importantly of course, fun. The primary usage of stretching is that you can grab onto solid platforms above you, after which you can pull yourself up in order to reach areas too high for you to simply jump into. Grabbing onto a ceiling this way also allows you to climb along the roof as well, bypassing danger such as spikes or swarms of enemies. You are however defenceless while climbing like this, so if there’s flying enemies patrolling across the ceiling you’ll be in trouble. While often situational, there’s also potential for sequence breaks and secret hunting, in addition to potentially making some dangerous situations a bit safer.

That’s not all the utility this mechanic has however, it can also be used to collect items. If there’s some items above you in a hard to reach spot being guarded by enemies, you may be able to instead collect them just by stretching up to the item to collect it, followed by immediately retracting your upper body back to the floor. Something else of note is that you don’t take damage if an enemy hits your stretched body either, instead you’ll just retract back to the ground on contact with an enemy with no loss to your HP. This means that you can also use the stretch in order to scout out areas safely and get an idea of what kind of platforming sequences and enemy formations await you ahead so you can better prepare. Absolutely superb mechanic, the best thing about the game by a landslide.

Don’t get the wrong idea however, that’s not the only positive that Robocod has to offer. This is a huge game with a ton of levels which manage to be varied and interesting the whole way through. Well, for the most part anyway. There are a few dull and drawn out maze levels with minimal action, but those are in the minority. Highlights include hopping across the bars and notes of sheet music, launching yourself out of circus cannons, levels played entirely upside down, riding a magical flying bathtub, platforming across the top of a speeding train, making your way across a giant snakes and ladders board, finding and defusing penguin-shaped bombs by exploring non-linear levels, levels with slopes that let you run as fast as Sonic if you run down them, the list goes on. This game is around two hours to beat, possibly more or less depending on how much you go out of your way to explore, but either way it’s a pretty sizeable game length for a game without a save function, so I give Robocod credit for having enough ideas to fill that runtime and keep gameplay interesting.

Mazes aside, I also greatly appreciate how expansive the level design frequently is. There’s secrets absolutely everywhere, alternate exits leading to secret levels, shortcuts, hidden items, extra lives, health, vehicles and more. I think the fact that I was still consistently finding new secrets in early levels I’ve played over and over again, even on my multiple replays, is a really good sign. The vehicles especially are rewarding to find. They make exploration and navigation much more safe since they are capable of dealing contact damage to enemies, plus you get to find even more secrets by using them to fly to places out of reach of your jumps and stretching. Vehicles are commonly a frustrating hindrance in platformers so it’s really relieving to find that flying around in a magical bathtub is as fun as it is a ridiculous spectacle.

With all the praise I’ve been showering Robocod in, you might be questioning why I left the game so exhausted and feeling mixed in spite of that all. The gameplay is solid, the music is catchy, and while I can imagine this next point being contentious depending on how disturbed you are by Pond’s slimy swollen fish cheeks, I think the game is cute and charming visually as well. The foundation is solid, but on a technical level, Robocod is also kind of held together by sellotape and a glue stick, and while not one of the hardest games out there by any means, it can be surprisingly punishing.

This may be one of the most bizarrely specific criticisms I have ever said in one of these reviews, but this game will make you hate the fact that cartoon characters only have four fingers. You’ve likely noticed the hud in the bottom left corner of these screenshots already. The green bar Pond is holding is your health bar, while his other hand is showing you how many lives you have left. If Pond is holding up four fingers then you have four lives, if he’s holding up three you only have three and so on. Extra lives can be earned by collecting ankhs, which award you a 1-UP on pickup.

The hud’s a very cute idea. It’s incredibly charming, especially seeing Pond’s expression gradually getting more and more deflated as you lose more lives, but this also caps the amount of extra lives you can have at once at a measly five, only counting one more extra life beyond the four that Pond can count with his fingers. If you do run out of lives, you’ll be brought to a continue screen where you can press start to keep playing, but you can only do this twice before you’re sent back to the title screen and have to start all over. This makes exploring significantly less rewarding the better you are at the game. If you’re already at max health and have five lives then you’re not going to be getting much use out of the supplies the game throws at you, leaving the stockpiles of extra ankhs contained in secrets just a disappointment instead of a satisfying reward. I started just ignoring secrets on repeat playthroughs as a result, which is a huge shame as I usually love secret hunting in games

Hit detection is consistently bad throughout as well. For instance, snakes are a common enemy and they are simply dispatched by jumping on them. This should be easy, they move slow and their wide sprite is easy to land on top of, but I've still had instances of taking damage when landing dead centre on top of them with seemingly no explanation. I have the screenshot to prove it even. Aside from just wonky general hit detection like this, there's a few other quirks you need to get used to. If two enemies are on top of each other it's impossible to jump on them without taking damage. Similarly, if an enemy is jumping up with a fast enough speed it may be able to damage you even if you're jumping on top of it as well, almost like it's going fast enough to clip through your attack and damage you instead. While the hit detection is usually fine, these kinds of bizarre quirks are just frequent enough that it makes jumping on enemies feel unreliable, which is an issue when it's your only method of self defence.

I can deal with the iffy hit detection up until the second last boss fight against the Ballerina. The pattern, her gimmick of having a fake doppelganger that can’t take or deal damage, this stuff is all fine. Extremely simple in fact due to you being able to stunlock her with well timed jumps. The actual challenge here is trying to wrap your head around the nonsensical hitboxes. You have to specifically jump on her head, her arms will deal damage. The hitbox on her arms however is much larger than the sprite itself, repeatedly resulting in Pond taking damage without even making physical contact with her. I beat this boss three times and while I got the timing down on the stunlock better each time I still feel like it was a fluke every time, other times I'd do what I thought was a perfectly aligned jump only to end up taking damage instead, or even just falling through her sprite. 11 lives is something she could tear through in a couple of minutes if I got particularly unlucky, in spite of her having one of the simplest patterns of any boss in the game with an easy stunlock. The ballerina isn't the boss fight here, the real fight is against the game’s hit detection.

The biggest technical issue however is that it's not just the hit detection that's unreliable, but the collision detection on the level geometry as well. Losing all your lives to a boss fight is frustrating, but there's nothing more crushing than losing all of that progress in a second even when you have 11 lives in reserve, all because Pond clipped into a solid platform that he can’t escape from, thus softlocking the game with no escape and forcing you to restart. I was unfortunate enough to have this happen to me twice. The first time it happened was early in the game so I didn't lose much progress, but the second time it happened was in the second last world in the game, robbing me of a potentially winning run instantly.

This is why I was so exhausted by Robocod by the time I finally beat it and a large part of why the last few paragraphs have been so cranky. With technical issues like this I often find it hard to tell if I'm just unlucky or if the game itself is janky and unpolished. Robocod already having a lot of hit detection issues and graphical glitches prior to these softlocks lead me to believe the latter, but it is still not an impossibility that I was unlucky on that front as well. Either way, going through a two hour long game with the knowledge that at any point something out of your control could break and softlock the game is, needless to say, awful.

This is definitely a case of ‘your mileage may vary’, as I would undoubtedly be much more positive in this review if not for those softlocks, but I can absolutely imagine people playing through the whole game multiple times without ever running into such a game-breaking bug. Robocod is honestly a solid piece of game design, restrictive lives system and occasional cheap beginners trap aside. It’s only the technical issues hampering my enjoyment and making me hesitate in recommending it. It’s also entirely possible that other ports of the game are more stable. I did also play the Master System port of Robocod to completion on my Game Gear, which is a damn solid port for the hardware which I didn’t run into any major glitches in. Possibly the Amiga original is better too? Either way, it’s a fun enough game when it works right. Hopefully you have better luck than I when it comes to the game running stable should you decide to give it a shot.

P.S. Shoutouts to the game over sequence. Seriously, look it up, it's hilariously morbid.

- Page written by MSX_POCKY, 16th June 2024