Review: RoboCop: Rogue City

After I played the demo of RoboCop: Rogue City earlier this month, I mentioned I had never watched the RoboCop sequels. Because of recommendations from the comments on that article, I finally watched RoboCop 2, and I’m glad I did.

Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t as good as the original, but it still had worthwhile parts. The biggest issue, though, is its resolution. It spends a lot of its runtime setting up interesting narrative threads that all begin converging, and then they just wrap it up with a boss battle. The end.

RoboCop: Rogue City has a lot of problems, but it also has a great deal of spectacular successes. Chief among them is the fact that it grabs a lot of the dangling threads of RoboCop 2 and finally gives them the resolutions they deserve. There’s bad news, however. The developer, Teyon, also acknowledges and sets up for RoboCop 3, and I cannot condone anyone legitimizing that mistake. We should erase that mistake.

RoboCop: Rogue City (PC [Reviewed], Xbox Series X|S, PS5)
Developer: Teyon
Publisher: Nacon
Released: November 2, 2023
MSRP: $59.99

As I alluded to, RoboCop: Rogue City is a game that falls smack between RoboCop 2 and RoboCop 3. It ties up loose ends of the former and leads into the events of the latter. It involves the eponymous cyborg trying single-handedly hold the city of Detroit together while navigating the fact that his creator, Omni Consumer Products, is the city’s single biggest threat.

If you’re unfamiliar with the series, it’s about police officer Alex Murphy who, after being brutally killed by thugs, is resurrected as an unstoppable cyborg by the morally bankrupt OCP. I respect 1987’s RoboCop for its nuance. At the forefront, it’s a fun, R-Rated movie for the whole family. However, it is an absolute lasagna of themes that include (but are not limited to) what makes us human, the dangers of profit-driven overreach, and the role of law enforcement in modern society. It’s really good stuff, and the dumb name actually plays into its corporate themes.

I’ve always believed that RoboCop, much like Superman, would be a difficult subject to authentically adapt to the video game medium. The character is a garbage truck on legs. He’s practically unstoppable. On top of that, his fastest walking speed is “stroll.” However, Teyon looked at this, thought it was awesome, and somehow created an effective game around it.

Testikills

When the guns come out, RoboCop: Rogue City is focused on making you feel every bit as unstoppable as Alex Murphy. There is very little visual feedback to damage, even when a grenade explodes at your feet. The first real warning that your armor is starting to crack hits when you’re at 20% health.

The Auto9 pistol you are constantly equipped with never runs out of ammo and never stops being your most effective weapon. A headshot always kills unless the enemy is wearing a helmet, and in those cases, you can just shoot them in the dick for an instant takedown. Heads explode like ripe melons, splattering marinara sauce in all directions. If you’re feeling sassy, you can grab thugs and hurl them at their friends or punch them to send them bowling down the corridor. You can grab explosive-adjacent items and hurl them into groups of thugs. There is also a slew of skills you can upgrade that give you some truly cruel extra combat abilities.

It’s excessive, and it’s awesome. However, it runs the risk of becoming stale after a while, since challenge is obviously not a primary concern here. Most of your combat options are unnecessary, making RoboCop: Rogue City a clearly dumb shooter.

But rather than take creative liberties with Murphy’s abilities, Teyon took a smarter approach to the gameplay: it’s not only about shooting.

Guns, guns, guns

RoboCop: Rogue City has more in common with Deus Ex than a standard cinematic FPS. While there are sections of the game where you mostly just blast your way through linear environments, you’re often set free in more open areas where you spend time investigating, exploring, and completing sidequests.

There’s a lot to like when it comes to Rogue City’s narrative. While it takes a lot of story beats from the movies, it very effectively focuses on Alex Murphy grappling with his identity. A lot of it involves him trying to prove his humanity, in the face of many referring to him as a product facing obsolescence. During this, he grapples with his memories in the form of “glitches,” which was touched on in the second movie and then never resolved. As a player, you make choices regarding his association with OCP and who Murphy chooses to affiliate with. You can stick to Alex Murphy’s established character or just go full RoboDick if you’d prefer. There are multiple endings based on your decisions.

It’s perhaps the characters that give the narrative its real beating heart. Murphy is explored in depth, but he also interacts with original characters who each have their own arc. Even secondary characters, like many of Murphy’s fellow officers, are given names and personalities. People who you help, even ones that make only minor appearances, often show up later in the game, which gives you a constant feeling of familiarity.

The dialogue is full of the characteristic wit of the films, with satirical scenes like drug dealers explaining supply and demand to someone undercutting their pricing. There are softer scenes, like when Murphy is assisting a police informant with finding a movie in a rental store. Like the stories on which it is based, there’s a lot to dig into.

Somewhere, there is a crime happening

However, despite all the ways that Rogue City impressed me, it’s hard to miss how janky the whole product is. Even from a presentation standpoint, it’s extremely inconsistent. Dialogue scenes have stilted animations that harken back to games from over a decade ago. Some of the cutscenes are reasonably well done, while others look terrible. Many of the characters are recognizable facsimiles of the ones in the movies, but the voices are often jarringly off, like the actors are straining to try and imitate them.

Peter Weller reprises his role as RoboCop, however, which is well done and just feels so right.

Gunplay also tends to get a bit ridiculous. Everything is leaned to make you feel as powerful as possible, which sometimes manifests in strange ways. You can grab enemies, for example, and that brings their faces straight up to the screen where you can view their awkward and gross visages. The grab, in general, has a range of a few feet, so if you hit the button (say during a slow-motion part) and the enemy is a few paces away from you, they’ll be drawn into your hand by an unseen force. The ragdoll is ridiculous, and environmental animations aren’t much better. I found all this to be amusing and enjoyable, but if you’re used to playing big-budget games from large publishers, the lack of polish might seem like a sign of poor quality.

You call this a GLITCH!?

Worst of all, however, are the technical problems I ran into. The audio levels are all over the place, with some characters sounding quiet and far away when they’re talking to you. I found it to be a huge improvement if I was listening through headphones. What was most distracting was the texture streaming problems I had constantly. The ground in front of me would be a blob of low-resolution textures that slowly come into focus while I stared at them. During the dialogue, whenever the shot would reverse to another character, I’d be treated to their soft, blurry faces for a while until patches of their skin would start to be rendered in higher resolution.

I took various troubleshooting steps to try and fix this, both with the game’s settings and my own graphics card, and nothing had any effect. I can often overlook performance issues, but this was so annoying and distracting throughout the entire game. I’m not sure if this problem exists on console versions. Maybe it will even be fixed in some early patch for the game. But it marred my experience.

Come quietly, or there will be… trouble

I said in my preview of Rogue City that I was curious to maintain the quality present in the demo. It’s certainly true that it gets clumsier as it moves towards its climax, but weirdly, it never loses its focus. It still manages to surprise all through its runtime, and there’s always something new to keep you engaged. I was afraid the environments would become less interesting, the story would start being rushed, or the game would eventually drop its exploration aspect, but that never happened. I feel that one of the game’s best setpieces shows up very close to the end. Everything gets proper closure.

In a lot of ways, RoboCop: Rogue City is a better successor to the first movie than either of its sequels. I think the only downside that a lot of fans will find is that it was made by a relatively small developer and backed by a less prominent publisher. There’s a lot less gloss than you’d find overlapping at a typical “AAA” game, but that also makes it obvious to see the passion that went into it.

That’s sort of what it comes down to. I feel like RoboCop: Rogue City is a terrific game. To use the obvious reference: I’d buy that for a dollar. I can see myself playing through its 15-20 hours again, not necessarily to check out things I may have missed, but simply to re-experience the world it presents. I know that it almost looks like something that belongs in the scrap heap, but if you’re able to look past its rough exterior and exposed seams, you might see the heart that beats underneath. Teyon did a fantastic job with the resources they had, but they’re only human.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}