Review | Robocop: Rogue City – When crime in the city’s underground begins to emerge on the streets and you can no longer see a way out, RoboCop offers a new way out in the 1980s. Half man, half machine – although that balance can tip either way depending on who’s calling the shots – Detective Alex Murphy knows how to defuse almost any situation, whether it’s one that requires diplomacy or a fresh dose of bullet-shaped bullets. In the front. With RoboCop: Rogue City, developer Teyon is now trying to succeed where two sequels and an uninspired remake failed miserably: give the tin cop an all-new adventure that will delight fans and newcomers alike.
Fresh blood
RoboCop: Rogue City takes place between the second and third films in the trilogy. A new player has emerged in the still crime-ridden city of Detroit, a shadowy figure with the financial resources to rival the evil plans that shun the light of day. Almost every gang in the city hopes to join this creep and automatically start applying for jobs. The more extreme the crime, the better. Soon blood is flowing through the gutters and the streets are filled with the corpses of the hapless police officers. A brutal hostage situation at a local news studio is a signal for RoboCop to take action. Teaming up with his loyal partner Anne Lewis, he shoots and slashes his way through the underworld in an attempt to take down the “new guy in town.”
RoboCop Story: Rogue City won’t immediately win any awards for originality, but it does a great job of making players feel like they’re playing the lead role in a new RoboCop movie. Almost everything feels authentic: Peter Weller returns as the voice of RoboCop, old acquaintances appear, last year’s soundtrack blares triumphantly over the speakers, and every element of the plot falls neatly within the series’ rules. In other words, the game doesn’t shy away from social criticism and also makes time to put Robocop’s psychology under the microscope. Murphy has to meet with a psychiatrist several times, and sometimes experiences flashbacks to his human period, before an attempt on his life condemns him to exist as a robot. Trust me: you won’t easily find a licensed game more faithful to its inspiration than this one.
Rain of lead and parking fines
RoboCop: Rogue City is a semi-open world game where you roam the streets as the titular cop and solve crimes. You play the game from a first-person perspective and regularly end up in hellish battles, where you take as much as you give. What Murphy lacks in speed – just like in the movie, he moves like a kind of tank and therefore wouldn’t immediately put Usain Bolt to the test – he makes up for with an oversized life bar and shooting gear that will mercilessly mince any opponent. Who wants his life? The gunfights are absolutely amazing, with environmental elements that can conveniently fly into smithereens and enemies that lose arms and legs when you hit them in the right place. A fitting throwback to 80s action films…although I’d be lying if I said the slow pace didn’t get on my nerves at times.
This frequency is especially disappointing when bullets aren’t flying around your ears. RoboCop often has to get from point A to point B in some neighborhood of the city and along the way he gets the opportunity to solve other crimes – let’s call them side missions. You can investigate crime scenes of unsolved murders to find the perpetrator, intervene in disputes that threaten to tear apart the streets and even pass a fine between the windshield wipers of illegally parked cars. Your actions have an impact on the further course of the game. If you always go by the book, your customers will be satisfied and you will get a higher job score, but people will become more hostile. However, those who turn a blind eye in time and heed the warning can sometimes count on unexpected support.
So, you are presented with a versatile game, one that easily transitions from old-fashioned explosions to Sherlock Holmes-like detective work and vice versa. Both elements of the game are fun, but they lack challenge in the first case and depth in the second – in other words: it’s all a bit too easy. Where RoboCop: Rogue City scores is in the way it develops Murphy’s skills. As you complete quests and collect evidence, you gain XP, slowly but surely filling out the skill tree. For example, you can purchase the ability to bounce bullets off walls and hit enemies behind cover. Or you can choose to enhance your deduction skills so you can find additional clues in the environment, which in turn makes it easier to interrogate the suspect and move on. Options, options, options.
Detroit, hell
When you walk the streets of Detroit, you’ll sometimes be thrilled by what you see. Graphically, it doesn’t really reach any heights, but the dilapidated city is convincingly littered with rubbish, the dirty alleys really make you feel unsafe, and the light reflections in the puddles of water give the game world a kind of attractive character despite all of the above. Abomination. As usual, you can choose between Quality and Performance mode, with the first aiming for 30fps at 4K and the second trading a bit of resolution at 60fps. Or at least it should. In fact, environments in Performance mode are noticeably blurrier and 60fps is barely achieved, with noticeable frame drops in cut scenes and big action scenes. So, for us, quality is “the way to go”, partly due to the slow pace of the game.
On a technical level, we’re not very impressed anyway. During a play session, we regularly encountered some bugs, such as environmental elements that fit together unnaturally, cutscenes that suddenly freeze after using the pause button so that you only hear sound, and even occasional crashes that force you to quit the game. . Above, we were quite complimentary about the environments, but we can’t say the same about the characters’ facial expressions, which unceremoniously took us back to a previous generation of consoles. Fortunately, everything continues to breathe RoboCop at all times, so fans can easily cover these flaws with a cloak of love. We have already talked about the excellent audio design which plays a role that should not be underestimated.
played on: PlayStation 5.
Also available on: Xbox Series
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