RoboCop: Rogue City is possibly the best game starring an action hero. It’s not hard to break the bar this time, but the adventure offers enough thrills to keep fans excited. This narrative-driven first-person shooter has a loving respect for the movies and a good understanding of its protagonist, swinging for the fences with a long origin story, fun references, and plenty of gleeful humor. Unfortunately, like the franchise’s vision of Detroit, Rogue City is very rough around the edges, resulting in a flawed hero but ultimately entertaining to patrol with.
Set between the occurrences of Robocop 2 And 3, the titular cyborg formerly known as Alex Murphy finds herself pulled in all directions. A mysterious figure known as “The New Guy” has arrived to wreak havoc on Detroit’s top gangs for an unknown nefarious purpose. The police department is under the thumb of Max Baker, the highly inept corporate stooge of Omni Consumer Products (OCP), who sees RoboCop and the police as ineffective relics of the past. Coping with countless little threads for RoboCop’s attention, like a detective journalist to help you uncover OCP secrets, a therapy session with a doctor who’s looking to find out what makes you tick ticks, and a new rookie partner who is also an OCP informant among others.
Overall, the game does a good job of tying these threads into a fun and cohesive story full of twists and turns. Although the 20-hour adventure wears out its welcome with several red herrings and false endings through the final act, Rogue City is a better RoboCop 3 than the movie. Robocop 3. It’s fun to hear actor Peter Weller reprise his role as RoboCop, and while the other performances are excellent, the character models and animations are as robotic as RoboCop himself. The lip sync is particularly bad, and it breaks down completely in several scenes, giving everyone the appearance of communicating via telepathy.
Wandering around an explorable police station between missions or open hubs like downtown leads to side missions that put RoboCop in weird, fun scenarios with Detroit’s best weirdos. Whether it’s solving a murder on the set of a sunscreen commercial, cleaning up boombox-blasting thugs from a storefront, or doing the “robot dance” at a child’s request, you can tell RoboCop’s job is just fine. There are covered vehicles that can happily provide. Dopey one-liners, and I’d be fine with that. Rogue City doesn’t take itself too seriously, capturing the dark satire of the first film and the campy absurdity of the sequels that, while not always hitting the mark, manage to work in a fun way.
Choice-driven dialogue offers opportunities to portray yourself as a tough enforcer who obeys the law no matter what or a more sympathetic, main character. Some of the choices do a good job of capturing the drama of RoboCop, which confronts moral shades of gray, such as supporting one of two morally questionable mayoral candidates or the public good. To commit illegal corporate espionage. Decisions move the story and characters forward in a variety of ways that lead to multiple endings that feel well-paid, such as helping a homeless drug addict and informant find self-worth. Or journalists deciding whether or not to expose your technical struggles.
Fighting crime often involves power-marching through corridors and back alleys to drag down stupid thugs as they shoot at you. Rogue City manages to make you feel like the human tank is RoboCop. You can’t duck or take cover and don’t need to. He’s durable enough to absorb dozens of bullets, and I loved getting headshots as he confidently marched through incoming fire from panicked targets. Other times, I got a kick out of grabbing enemies and throwing them into rooms. I felt powerful but not invincible; In a tight firefight, which usually meant more enemy numbers and more powerful artillery, rationing a small inventory of health packs became a difficult ordeal. This is most true during Big Boss battles against the familiar RoboCop opponents, who veer into unfair territory due to their high speed and constant offense compared to your relatively limited mobility.
Aside from RoboCop’s signature sidearm, which sports unlimited ammo, the arsenal of weapons is by-the-numbers and hit-and-miss in terms of the punch they pack. Automatic weapons look good, but shotguns and sniper rifles pale in comparison. The enemy AI is also dumb as rocks. Enemies often stand in place, inconsistently go for cover, get stuck in geometry, or, in rare cases, kill each other. I laughed out loud when I saw two motorcycle goons accidentally crash into each other during a collision.
Still, the action delivers solid thrills in a basic meat-and-potatoes way. Everything works well enough to provide a good time. In addition, many environments are highly destructible, adding to the spectacle of battles. Rogue City may not quite deliver in terms of polish or ambition, but it offers a powerful, if repetitive, satisfaction in blasting gangsters as they explode into blood, limbs and brains. are
Earning points to master various traits, such as Combat, Armor, Engineering and Deduction, adds unique perks that improve combat and exploration. My favorite perks include buffing my armor to the point that some bullets go off, killing their senders. An engineering advantage allows me to force into a safe that I would otherwise have to find a combination for. A clean combat advantage lets me trick shots from certain levels to eliminate targets behind cover. Different chipboards of increasing complexity, in which you create paths to passive perks by slotting different nodes while avoiding hitting debuffs, help improve general performance, but re-slot nodes on each new board. Karna became a tedious exercise.
Outside of battle, you engage in detective work by scanning crime scenes for clues, collecting evidence, and interrogating suspects. The process is streamlined – just scan the highlighted objects until RoboCop and friends make a breakthrough, such as opening a new dialog option for interrogation – but these segments are nice breaks that are less of a character. Mixes up the gameplay while highlighting the killing abilities.
RoboCop’s recurring glitches are a basic plot device, but the technical bugs became a real hindrance to the game. Enemies have a habit of sinking into the floor or going through walls, complicating combat encounters. Cutscenes sometimes have pixelated transitions from scene to scene, and texture pop-ins abound. Poor audio mixing means some characters speak too loudly while others sound normal. The game failed to recognize when I completed an objective a couple of times, forcing me to reload a save and play the section again. Late game, some guns automatically fired before I pulled the trigger, wasting ammo.
Hopefully, updates will iron out these issues as RoboCop: Rogue City delivers a respectable adventure that feels like a lost shooter from the early 2010s in a mostly good way. Admittedly, the license takes the game through its rough patches; If you’re not a RoboCop fan, Adventure might feel dated or small compared to other shooters. But as a B-tier love letter to the Tin Man in Blue, Rogue City is a welcome return to the limelight for Alex Murphy.