Robocop: Rogue City Review: OCP’s Finest (PS5)

Apologies for the strange metaphor, but in a hypothetical video game company yearbook, Teyon would effortlessly win the award of “Most Improved”. They went from developing an endless sea of 3DS and Wii shovelware to Rambo: The Video Game, one of the worst licensed games in recent memory. And yet in 2019, they released Terminator: Resistance, which I persistently hear is one of the most underrated shooters of the past few years. They went from a horrid licensed cash grab to a game that did right by the IP and didn’t play like goat vomit.

When RoboCop last patrolled the mean streets of videogame land, it was with Titus’ 2003 game, simply called RoboCop. A buggy, broken, wretched FPS, that served as the long-deserved death knell for the creators of the Nintendo 64’s infamous Superman game. RoboCop has been deserving a new game for long enough, and Teyon is here to deliver it. Will RoboCop: Rogue City be another Rambo? Or will it build on the successes of Terminator: Resistance and become the best RoboCop game ever? (Not that that’s a particularly high bar to clear.)

RoboCop: Rogue City launches November 2nd on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC for $59.99. A demo is available on PC only. 

Story: Ghost in the Machine

I’d like to think that RoboCop doesn’t need an introduction. You are RoboCop, the broken shattered remains of police officer Alex Murphy transformed into a cyborg crime fighter. As RoboCop, you fight as a one-man army against crime, fighting hordes of gangsters, all while trying to solve a grand conspiracy that goes all the way to the top of Omni Consumer Products, the shadowy megacorporation vying for control of Detroit. It’s a lot of familiar territory to the movies, it feels like it fits right in. This truly does feel like an authentic RoboCop story, compounded with news stories and fake advertisements that showcase just how broken and awful Detroit really is. The Detroit of the RoboCop universe, not the real Detroit I mean. It’s important to clarify.

The characters are also surprisingly likable. A ton of them are borrowed straight from the movies. RoboCop, Anne Lewis, the police chief, and Murphy’s family, all look and act like they’re supposed to. And the new characters, like RoboCop’s new partner Ulysses Washington and professional OCP jackass Sam Becker, are fun to interact with. The one thing I dislike about the game’s narrative is that I think it has a very weak villain. He feels like a villainous self-insert OC. Nothing ever goes wrong for him, Robocop always breaks down as he approaches him, and he’s the previously unmentioned relative of a very minor villain from the first movie.

OCP’s goons certainly have their priorities in order.

They Saved Murphy’s Brain

One particularly interesting thing regarding the game’s story is that it makes an active attempt to lean more into the human side of RoboCop, something most of it’s spinoffs tend to overlook. One of the game’s recurring plot threads involves RoboCop seeing persistent visions of his past life as Alex Murphy, particularly of his family, and these visions are legitimately distressing at times, with lots of reality warping and hearing his friends and family call him a monster. It’s a game that asks you the question, are you Alex Murphy, the loving family man with a heart of gold; are you RoboCop, the heartless enforcer of OCP, stamping down on crime with your mighty iron foot; or do you lie somewhere in-between? Depending on your answers, you’ll massively affect the future of Detroit and achieve one of several different endings.

The game tracks how you treat characters, and your actions have an obvious impact on the city, which I appreciate. There’s definitely an incentive to go for multiple playthroughs to see how the story will evolve.

RoboCop can be your angel or your devil.

Gameplay: Nice shooting, son!

RoboCop was built to do exactly two things. Solve crimes, and blow away criminals, and this game will have you doing a lot of both. The shooting action feels very solid, and though I hate using such a cliche phrase, it truly does make you feel like RoboCop. You’re hit like a freight train, can throw dumpsters, melee weapons, and explosive barrels at enemies, and can take a lot of punishment, even on the hardest difficulty. But you’re a big target, move slowly, and unlike most modern shooters, do not have a grappling hook. You have to play slowly, and cautiously, and use all of RoboCop’s special abilities to achieve success. 

RoboCop is known for being many things, but a detective is not one of them. Rogue City strives to change that, giving RoboCop access to RoboCop Vision, as useful as it is lazily named. RoboCop uses Robocop Vision to scout out crime scenes, find hidden items and entrances, and solve puzzles. Robocop Vision isn’t a particularly deep mechanic, but it doesn’t have to be. My only complaint with RoboCop Vision is that using it also activates ironsight aiming, meaning surveying the environment in a gunfight can be difficult. It’s still a perfect way to add variety to the game. There are also quick shoot-out breaching challenges, boss fights, and efficiency challenges where Robocop must duel with a security team or an ED-209 to see who can defeat more criminals. You’re never doing the same thing for long in Rogue City.

It’s never been more fun to solve crimes the RoboCop way.

RoboCop Playing Game

One attempt at adding variety I’m less than wild about is the various side-quests. Sidequests can be found in most of the game’s areas, and their implementation is very poor. The quests themselves aren’t inherently bad, but their availability is. All of the game’s sidequests are time-limited, and leaving the area will make any incomplete sidequests permanently unavailable. The game will sometimes inform you you’ll miss out on sidequests when progressing the story, other times it won’t. To add insult to injury, RoboCop gets graded after each day, and it sucks when I get penalized for failing to complete quests the game did not inform me were available. Sidequests also rarely offer any incentive to complete them outside of earning more EXP.

Another thing I’m fairly mixed on is the RPG elements. RoboCop has a fairly standard skill tree. You can upgrade one of RoboCop’s eight vital statistics, and at certain skill milestones, Robocop will gain or improve one of his abilities. Upgrading RoboCop’s abilities works well enough, but gun upgrading is nowhere near as exciting. Robocop always has access to his iconic Auto-9, which serves as an infinite ammo sidearm. He can only carry one additional weapon, which I find to be incredibly restrictive. Only the Auto-9 can get upgraded, through PCBs and upgrade chips RoboCop finds throughout the world. There’s little variety in the Auto-9’s upgrades, and PCBs recycle the same handful of abilities constantly. The whole thing just feels unnecessarily complicated.

There’s drugs and hidden loot everywhere. Crime doesn’t pay criminals, but it does pay RoboCop very well.

Graphics/Sound: Delta City Shine

For something that wasn’t a AAA production, RoboCop: Rogue City does an excellent job of recreating the movie’s sad little dying world. RoboCop’s model looks excellent, and Detroit is a fittingly nasty and ugly place. There’s tons of environmental variety too, with streets, industrial parks, and underground areas crawling with gangsters. You’ll also see a lot of familiar locations from the movies, the police station especially is nearly a 1-1 recreation. There’s some very impressive lighting and atmospheric detail on top of all that, making Detroit look majestic at times.

As good as many of these environments are, the best part is that they’re destructible as well. Walls, cover, and environmental props can be blasted to bits. And you can inflict just as much damage on the human body as well, with some satisfying gore effects. Blood splatters everywhere, and you can blast limbs and heads off with sufficiently powerful weapons. It wouldn’t be a RoboCop game if it wasn’t stuffed to the gills with gore. I love how you can mess up the human body, but character models in general don’t seem up to snuff. Outside of RoboCop himself, they look weirdly plasticky, was definitely getting an uncanny valley feeling at times.

Detroit has never looked better.

A Sound of Criminals Screaming

Sound design is sadly not up to snuff compared with the graphics. The game seems weirdly quiet, with the streets of Detroit in particular sounding suspiciously empty. The game could really have done with some more atmospheric music. Paradoxically, when there is music, I’ve had occasions where the sound is completely blown out and I can’t hear the dialogue and sound effects. The music itself is great at least, lots of 80’s synth action music. The opening shootout is set to RoboCop’s iconic theme song, I could not think of any way to do it better.

Peter Weller returns as RoboCop, reprising his role from the first two movies, which lends the game a sense of authenticity. RoboCop sounds just like you remember, and even has a ton of funny new one-liners. None of the other voice acting is particularly amazing or memorable, but I could let that slide. If you’re splurging on a famous actor like Peter Weller, I can hardly blame Teyon for cutting corners elsewhere.

The game is largely glitchless at launch. There’s long texture load-in and ragdoll bugs, but those were fairly insignificant. The one major glitch I found had to do with the audio. I’ve heard the game’s dialogue occasionally “robot” if that makes any sense. Everything gets a metallic flange to it and sounds distorted, and I could only fix it by resetting the game.

RoboCop: Rogue City was reviewed for PlayStation 5 using a key provided by deadgoodmedia