I really didn’t expect RoboCop: Rogue City to even be any good when it was first revealed, let alone be absorbed in a demo of it for hours. Licensed games are rarely high up on my priorities, and even though I love RoboCop, I never thought anyone would go to the effort of doing the movie justice in a video game.
RoboCop is a lot more than just a license easily transferable to action figures. The 1987 movie was a surprisingly grey look at corporate overreach, gentrification, the role of police, and the nature of humanity, among other things. Those themes, as well as the ultra-violence depicted, make it strange that it would be adapted into a children’s cartoon. It’s so ironic for the license; an irony that was probably missed by the marketing department.
And while the action-oriented plot and memorable protagonist would – and have – been ample groundwork for a braindead action game, I figured it would be too much work for a licensed title to really create something faithful to the movie. For that matter, I can’t believe the developer who turned Rambo into a rail shooter would be the one to make the attempt. But if the demo is any indication, they’ve succeeded.
Somewhere, there is a crime happening
RoboCop: Rogue City supposedly takes place between RoboCop 2 and RoboCop 3. I’ll take their word for it since I’ve never watched the sequels. I’ve heard they weren’t as good as the original, and some of the cast complained about the studio’s handling of the material, so I just ignored them. It doesn’t feel like I missed much because I would absolutely believe that Rogue City also ignored the sequels.
If you’re unfamiliar, RoboCop is a mechanized weapon of law enforcement created by resurrecting fallen officer Alex Murphy as a zombie cyborg. The demo starts off with Murphy doing what he does best and marching into danger along with his partner Anne Lewis.
The thing about RoboCop is he seems barely capable of movement. His advantage against crime is that he’s virtually immune to small arms firepower, but any perpetrator capable of moving faster than a brisk walk can evade him. You would expect that any first-person shooter developer would take some creative liberties with this and just make Murphy move and die like any other protagonist, but they really didn’t.
RoboCop is a dumpster on legs. He can take immense amounts of damage without stopping, and that’s exactly how RoboCop: Rogue City plays.
That’s it, buster. No more military aid!
I am not sure I have ever experienced such a satisfyingly dumb shooter. It feels so good to be RoboCop. Even with your default pistol, you can absolutely tear down anything in your way. Any damage can be patched up with a health pack. I often wondered who would be dumb enough to actually take shots at the walking death machine, and that carries through to Rogue City. It felt like playing with god-mode on. The swarms of thugs were merely flies to be swatted.
If you’ve watched any video of the game in action, it looks extremely janky. It is. There’s no way around it, but all the combat has a veneer of dopiness to it. You can grab enemies and hurl them at each other. You can serve the public trust by hurling them out the window. Years of deliberately playing bad games has left me inoculated to jank. If you’re not, you probably won’t get my excitement.
However, the combat is only part of it. You might have expected the demo to stop after the first mission, but it doesn’t. After the prologue, you’re allowed to wander around the Detroit Metro West Precinct and can pick up and complete some rather unique side-quests. But it doesn’t stop after that, either. You’re then sent off into Old Detroit to try and track down a perpetrator.
One parking ticket is all it takes to improve mindfulness
The surprising thing is that RoboCop: Rogue City doesn’t just depict Murphy as an action protagonist but also as a cop. The chunk of Old Detroit you’re left to explore is a large hub environment, similar to the open areas of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Instead of just heading off to the mission waypoint, you’re rewarded for serving the public trust. This doesn’t just take the form of optional combat and investigation activities, but also in ticketing for petty crimes. Along the way, Murphy muses to himself about what a great job he’s doing.
This is the most surprising part to me because I definitely expected a straightforward first-person shooter. I was not expecting Deus Ex mixed with L.A. Noire. It’s a difficult mixture to work on, and not something I expected from Nacon and Teyon. Yet, somehow, it’s here. And even more surprising is that it all works.
The budgetary restrictions mostly show when it comes to the game’s graphics. The environments shown off look okay, but the characters are invariably terrible-looking. While RoboCop is based on his original actor, Peter Weller, I wasn’t sure about some of the other characters. They often look similar, but I can’t tell if they’re supposed to be legally distinct or just terrible renders of their real-world actors.
You call this a glitch!?
Meanwhile, you’re graded on your performance and can spend your experience on tuning Murphy in both combat and investigation abilities. In various ways, these abilities present themself outside of combat. Deduction, for example, can allow you to obtain pieces of evidence that make it easier to nab the perpetrator. I just can’t believe that it’s a feature in a RoboCop game.
I’m very curious to see if RoboCop: Rogue City can maintain the quality shown in the demo through a full-length game. If Teylon does manage to pull it off, it might become an unexpected favorite for me this year. Because while there is jank and rough edges abound, there is also an obvious passion and excitement in putting it together. There are way easier routes to take in creating a RoboCop game, but Teyon didn’t take them. They went for something much more fascinating. And that shows a level of passion and excitement that you just rarely see in licensed games or any game with massive budgets and huge teams.
You can try the RoboCop: Rogue City demo on PC through Steam here.
