RoboCop: Rogue City Review

RoboCop: Rogue City does not allow players to jump.

For about an hour I would tap the X button on my DualSense trying to get former all-human cop Alex Murphy to hop over a railing or jump over a barrier. The simple act of jumping and mantling is such a creature comfort in any game that it was a shock to the system having the ability stripped from me. Despite the fact that I was a robot cop, likely weighing a few thousand pounds.

Plus, I don’t recall RoboCop jumping in the 1987 Verhoeven film, or its sequel. Though there was that time he used a jetpack in RoboCop 3… but we won’t talk about that.

Developer Teyon’s prime directive of creating a faithful rendition of the RoboCop universe is done by eschewing many modern shooter norms, sacrificing a small amount of comfort and familiarity for the betterment of the game.

Like many products of its era, RoboCop had its fair share of gaming translations. However, their quality was suspect. Whether it be Alien, The Terminator, Rambo, or any other violent, yet marketable property, believe there was a licensed Nintendo game for it. But these products never suffered because of a discernible lack of gore or action. They failed because they were quick cash grabs likely made in a rushed development cycle under pressure from an unaware publisher that was focused on hot properties. Yes, we’re looking at you LJN.

As a child there would have been no reason for me to play a videogame about a police officer that is brutally gunned down. But back then before the ESRB the technology wasn’t really there to show off such gory deaths. This is an era where masked serial killer Jason Voorhees wore purple pants in his NES rendition. So, like all its other compatriots, RoboCop was another property with an endless slew of generic enemies that players could shoot in colorful 8-bit environments that vaguely resembled moments from the films.

Rogue City in no way feels like a cash grab. More importantly, it doesn’t casually use the visage of RoboCop to elicit nostalgia. Honestly, with no new RoboCop entry on the horizon outside of a hypothetical Amazon Studios series or film, the franchise hasn’t necessarily risen from the heights of the first two films. I would argue that making a RoboCop game in 2023 is more of a risk than anything. Thankfully, Rogue City is anything but safe.

Which brings me back to jumping.

RoboCop in Rogue City moves slow. He has two default speeds: a chunky walk and a somewhat peppier run. Think back on the last dozen or so shooters you’ve played in the past ten years. How many of them could you jump in? Crouch? Slide? Wall jump? Rogue City features none of those luxuries and is better for it.

When crafting an FPS, action should be tantamount. But that action should also be grounded in the reality of the game. While Call of Duty‘s slides may imply your soldier’s pants are made of oiled-up wheels, it’s not completely out of the realm of possibility, especially if you watch a baseball player sail through the dirt to first base. Titanfall 2‘s enhanced tech allows normal humans to run along walls and boost jump. And doing those actions are a blast because they amplify the maps and scenarios players are placed in.

In Rogue City, players are RoboCop, the half-man, half-robot Alex Murphy who was killed in the line of duty and brought back to life. Equipped with three prime directives–serve the public trust, protect the innocent, and uphold the law–RoboCop works for the Detroit Police Department. However, both RoboCop and the Detroit police are bankrolled (as in controlled) by Omni Consumer Products (OCP).

The 1987 film saw Detroit through the eyes of a near-future bordering on dystopia. Corrupt corporations controlled cops and consumers. This was a world where money was the law and RoboCop was merely another product used to enforce those interests. But the vision in the RoboCop films wasn’t absurdly futuristic, rather bordering on cyberpunk. RoboCop himself was a hulking mass meant to establish authority rather than the fear of the skeletal Terminator machines.

The work to recreate the heft and might of RoboCop in Rogue City is done through deliberate restraint. RoboCop in this game can run but not very fast. He takes no fall damage but can’t jump. He can walk into a lobby full of gunfire but become overwhelmed by explosions and heavy caliber rounds. This is not the RoboCop of the 2014 reboot. This is a machine made with the 1980s just in the rear view mirror. Sleek but not opulent. Large but not clumsy. Futuristic but not unrealistic.

An effort was made to create scenarios in which players feel empowered, not overpowered. Rogue City opens with a hostage crisis at a television station. RoboCop breaches the lobby and is rushed by a number of gun-wielding punks. Playing on the second-hardest difficulty, I was able to stand in the open and withstand a barrage of bullets for several seconds, only losing half my health.

Power fantasy isn’t the right expression when dealing with RoboCop. After all, Alex Murphy died a horrible death and is treated like property with his corporate overlords barely recognizing his humanity. But Rogue City wishes to establish the sheer power of a policeman housed inside near-indestructible metal with senses and reflexes boosted by computers.

Players don’t need to crouch behind cover or quickly strafe around a room. Shooting in Rogue City is heavy and sometimes inaccurate. This is more a representation of arena shooters of the early 90s or less refined console shooters like Goldeneye. And that isn’t a dig at Rogue City or any of those prior gems. If I’m playing a RoboCop game, I want him to be slow; a deliberate badass capable of walking into a room, bullets ricocheting off his armor, as that enhanced vision tracks down murderers in the haze of debris and explosions.

Several shootouts will occur in Rogue City much like that opening lobby battle. RoboCop walks into an office building, a warehouse, a drug den, or the basement of an arcade and starts blasting. An obscene number of people will come in from a monster closet or run into view from a corner and RoboCop will dispatch them all in seconds without blinking an eye. There is certainly a part of me that wishes the core formula expanded upon this concept a bit more over the course of the game’s 20-30 hours.

The biggest complaint will likely be that players mostly walk and talk or walk and shoot in their role as RoboCop. Teyon throws enough wrenches into the mix to keep things from being overly stagnant. RoboCop when close enough can grab or punch enemies and jettison them off like a pathetic ragdoll. Computer screens, dumpsters, sledgehammers, gasoline tanks, motorcycles, and more can be grabbed and thrown to instantly kill a person or set off a chain reaction. At one point in the game, enemies loop around RoboCop on motorcycles taking potshots. Tired of missing them with a gun, I walked up and punched a dude on his cycle. I watched him disappear in a crash of blood before the motorcycle exploded on impact with my fist, carving off 30 points of RoboCop’s health. I simply laughed. The same when I picked up a motorcycle and threw it at another, watching the double explosion.

Players can pick up dropped weapons on the ground such as heavy pistols, grenade launchers, assault rifles, snipers, shotguns, and SMGs. These all have limited ammo counts but can be replenished. But I always defaulted to RoboCop’s Auto 9 gun, a pistol with rapid-fire capabilities that had infinite ammo. Over the course of the game, players can equip motherboards to the Auto 9 and apply modification chips that enhance the stats of the gun or add new features to it.

Gunplay in Rogue City is exceptional. Not only because of the realistic chunkiness of it but because of how ultimately satisfying it remains over the course of the game. Hundreds of corpses later and I never tired of scanning a new room to highlight enemies and start firing. There are various enemy types to spice things up but aside from a few foes with extra armor, everyone falls fast to RoboCop. And few things are as satisfying as the game’s headshot noise. Rogue City may feature one of the most delectable headshot squelches in gaming. Maybe it sounds obscene but it fits RoboCop canon perfectly to have an enemy’s head sound like a watermelon full of jelly and lard be shot through a hole the size of a nickel.

Teyon’s dedication to this vision of RoboCop is extremely admirable but they continue to further sell the fantasy with its version of Detroit. Dodging the unironic, kid-friendly variant of RoboCop 3–and yeah, we know they made toys for kids–Rogue City is nestled after the events of RoboCop 2. Cain is dead and the drug Nuke he peddled is very prominent. To focus players, Peter Weller has returned to provide his voice and likeness to the role and actress Nancy Allen’s likeness is used for RoboCop’s partner Anne Lewis. Weller, despite having his voice modified, kills the role, delivering one-liners and emotional beats with that straight-laced attitude that just barely masks inner demons. The rest of the cast can be hit or miss, especially with the long list of speaking roles the game surprised me with.

The main narrative takes a short bit to kick in but it involves a character from a previous film trying to make life worse for RoboCop and Detroit. It may be easy to see where the narrative is going early on but the enjoyment isn’t from the plot beats. Instead, Teyon obviously did their homework and have proven themselves to be massive fans, good researchers, or both.

Part of RoboCop‘s charm is the biting commentary from all angles. It’s more than just “corporations are bad and that humanity is a sliding scale.” One of Rogue City‘s early side missions had me sitting open-mouthed in shock at how goofy but accurate it was to the nature of the film. In it, a drug dealer is selling Nuke on the streets at half the cost of the people he buys it from, guaranteeing that people will want the cheap product. He is confronted by the higher-ups on how the economics of the situation simply don’t work and how he is actually affecting the market. I can’t remember the last time a game tackled such subject matter as parody but the trend continues through several parts of the game.

Players will be able to listen to joke advertisements and news briefings that expose how callous and uncaring the world has become. Sunblock 5000–the sunscreen lotion that exists because of the depleted ozone–plays a part in a murder case. The first ad I heard was for a sleep aid for children because the kid kept asking their dad about what an eviction notice was. It’s humor like that which twists the knife just a small bit that make Rogue City an optimal RoboCop experience.

Those familiar with the more omnipresent themes of RoboCop will also find a lot to appreciate here outside of witty one-liners and clever social commentary. OCP’s role as a corporation that has bought out the cops and is trying to stamp out crime for financial gain remains. It plays a larger role later in the story when players finally encounter the Old Man after having dealt with his slimy henchman at the police department.

More engaging, however, is the correlation between the RoboCop/Alex Murphy dichotomy and how that affects the role-playing aspect of Rogue City. The game creates numerous opportunities for players to choose how RoboCop responds to another character or a given situation. He can act like a by-the-books police officer, programmed to do the bidding of OCP and the Detroit police. Rather than simply letting a teen graffiti artist off with a warning, players can arrest them. When confronted by a psychologist, players can choose to be distant from the inner turmoil of what is Murphy’s brain fueling the RoboCop machine or speak on past trauma.

There are enough shades of gray in Rogue City that I felt like I was having influence on how the public, friends, police, and the OCP were viewing my actions. Without retreading the events leading up to Murphy’s death, the game could have dabbled a bit more in those moment where the human side was interfering with the robotic. A few times RoboCop will glitch out and see and hear things that aren’t there, causing malfunctions. But this wasn’t experimented with enough. Instead, much of the “path” that can be taken in Rogue City is about what kind of person or robot players want to be. To the game’s credit, there are multiple endings and based on the strength of the story, I’m inclined to see what those other options are. Though I do find it difficult to imagine RoboCop as an unfeeling machine that says things to hurt others. But it is interesting that that option is provided to players.

As a final touch on the RPG nature of Rogue City, players will earn experience that turns into skill points. Those points can be invested to increase specific attribute paths of RoboCop. There’s ones specifically for health, combat damage, and armor. One tree specifically focuses on speech buffs but that doesn’t become important until later in the game. New abilities and modifications can be made when using enough skill points in a tree. Players can unlock a quick dash, automatically unlock safes without knowing the combination, boost the amount of health charges RoboCop has, unleash a damaging shockwave, or slow down time even more during breach moments when RoboCop bursts through a wall.

Many of these buffs are interesting enough to inject a tantalizing bit more replay and experimentation into Rogue City. As cool as it is to watch walls and columns fall apart with bullets, it’s even cooler to scan an enemy and be able to fire a bullet that will ricochet around a corner and hit them. Eventually, RoboCop can become a near-invincible killing force which is never a bad thing.

Despite many of the elements of Rogue City coming together in the best way possible, the game is technically rough around the edges. Perhaps my biggest gripe was the subpar lip-syncing of almost every character. In such a dialog heavy game, it had the tendency to be mildly distracting. Stranger, though, was how the visuals on the screen scrambled for about a quarter of a second each time the camera cut in a cinematic. It happened almost every time and potentially something related to screen-tearing or something off about camera transitions.

At one point a character spoke to me and violently vibrated up and down almost to the point he was blurry. Checkpoints seemed off and audio cues would misfire or crash into each other. Once the game crashed on me and many times I had pop-in. But regardless of the many issues I had during my time with Rogue City, there was just enough charm and just enough jank that it didn’t completely pull me out of the game. More so, it felt like I was playing a B-movie that was a patch away from being a true hit.

Rogue City deserves a sequel. I’ll go ahead and say it. Teyon has proved their knowledge and skill at replicating the world and feeling of RoboCop. A few times, I felt like I was playing a spin-off of Deus Ex with its small hub areas full of side missions and things to discover. The game feels like this successful experiment or jumping off point that could evolve in brilliant ways with enough iteration. Maybe in a sequel we would get vehicle chases or, god help us, a jetpack section. Suffice it to say, there’s something to this.

RoboCop: Rogue City is a worthy successor to Verhoeven’s 1987 masterpiece. There is no question that developer Teyon shot for the moon and hit the landing many times. The game may be technically rusty at times but it always surpasses those hindrances with exceptional, powerful gunplay that hearkens back to the best classic shooters. Executing on RoboCop‘s stark dystopian vision, Rogue City is violent, comic, and definitely serves the public trust.