If ever a character was born to headline a video game, it’s RoboCop. His main interaction with the world is through violence, and he’s capable of taking immense punishment from enemy henchmen in the process. As dystopic Detroit’s lone cyborg enforcer, he’s the center of every story, always entrusted with some critical mission. All the little quirks we’ve accepted as inherent to a center-of-the-universe video game protagonist are simply part of his character.
The only problem is that RoboCop isn’t very nimble. He’s unable to crouch or jump, and he can’t move at a pace faster than a brisk stroll. The ideal RoboCop game, then, likely involves the static shootouts of a light gun cabinet. But those are out of fashion, so RoboCop: Rogue City is instead a shooter with light open-world elements, RPG progression, and no shortage of mechanized toddling between quest markers. There are even dialogue choices and skill checks in old-school green text that recalls Fallout. (If your armor stat is high enough in one level, for example, you can select the dialogue option to safely detonate a bomb by holding it close to RoboCop’s body.)
While Rogue City does feature an almost sacrilegious sprint button, the game is otherwise intensely dedicated to embodying the character, down to Peter Weller returning for the voice and likeness. Rather than simply putting a RoboCop skin over a Call of Duty template, the game smartly adapts mechanics and progression to fit the character. For one, holding down the trigger to aim overlays the screen with scanlines and activates RoboCop’s targeting system that highlights enemies in green. Skill points are doled out in larger chunks between levels as part of the nefarious OCP Corporation’s system to monitor RoboCop. Different loadouts take the form of equippable circuit boards, letting players fine-tune stats like damage and armor-piercing capability through a menu that works like a pipe-matching minigame.
Unfortunately, all these bells and whistles are in service of a character who just doesn’t leave much room for variation. Across 10 hours, Rogue City might have possibly sustained itself solely on the shooting and the thudding, squishing sound effects that accompany it. But cross the stupefying 20-to-30-hour mark that the game actually lasts and the mechanics grow stale. None of the additional powers you earn like a dash move or slow motion fundamentally change your strategy of slowly walking through environments, shooting guys in the distance and sometimes punching them when they get close. You can pick up enemy firearms, but most feel weightless next to RoboCop’s omnipresent machine pistol with unlimited ammo.
The game’s limited open-world elements do manage to inject some variety into the proceedings, despite contributing to the bloated playtime. You often return to a small section of Detroit to complete sidequests and acquire a handful of collectibles, offering a glimpse at the more mundane aspects of life in this world. You enter apartments and shops as part of these side stories, and a persistent quest to find misdemeanors will have RoboCop issuing parking tickets. And the whole thing is an admirable attempt at having us embody the character as he gets to know the neighborhood. (Some of the quests wouldn’t feel out of place in a Yakuza game.)
But all that feels incongruent with the game’s source material. Perhaps it’s a bit naïve to hope that any social commentary can survive decades of franchising, but Rogue City’s handling of RoboCop leaves hardly a trace of his origins as a commentary on police violence and militarization. All the time you spend clomping around the faithfully rendered interior of the police station is in service of selling the cops as a force for good, with RoboCop’s actions emphatically meant to make the world a better place. There’s even a dialogue option to call the police a “family,” now totally decoupled from standard sci-fi corporate malfeasance. Rogue City has clearly put a lot of thought and effort into replicating the world of this character, but it does so within a mechanical and narrative framework that never quite fits.
This game was reviewed with code provided by Dead Good PR.
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I assume this pro-crime author lives in San Fransisco and is pleased with the way it is policed and governed.
This is literally a throwback to an 80s cop movie. The point is to make it so it’s like one of those movies, and people enjoy the nostalgia. You want to ruin their fun because you insist every single piece of media must adhere to your rigid leftist ideology and you are attempting to ruin popular culture. Guess what, about 80% of the population will never agree with the ideology that has been implanted into your brain from your liberal arts college and you will remain a poor “journalist” until you get a real job and move on.
Only someone who breathes through their mouth walks away from this review thinking that the writer is advocating for crime. (Mark Shwartz, has the comments section to NY Post articles been shuttered?) The game is LITERALLY based on Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop and the reviewer is dinging it for losing sight of that sci-fi classic’s entire point. Keep reaching like that and you’re bound to hurt yourself.
Everyone on planet Earth breathes through their mouth. So you guys are in agreeance then?