RoboCop Rogue City was quite a surprising turn of events for the 80s to early 90s series of films, with a later flopped reboot in 2014. A first-person shooter with hints of investigation and police work akin to a Police Simulator. Following Alex Murphy as the ritual RoboCop, set between the events of the second and third films. Has Murphy’s second revival led to a bright future?
You Call This A GLITCH?
Thrown headfirst into the deep end of the pool, RoboCop Rogue City wastes no time getting into the action and the main plot. Murphy must stop crime whilst unveiling a plot to take over Detroit and replace it with a fancier version, though at the risk of the current residents and little thought paid to the lower class.
If you’ve not seen any of the movies you’ll have a hard time catching up with what’s going on. You have to complete the tutorial before any sense of background information is given to you, but even then it is rather sparse and stripped down. You know the barebones, Murphy died and was made into RoboCop essentially reviving him. But little to no information about how he died, the surrounding circumstances, or the other characters on display.
Your first run of RoboCop Rogue City will last around 15 hours, if you engage with all of its side content, marking misdemeanours on the roads, and looking for hidden stashes. A run wholly focused on the story aspects will be closer to 8 hours. Much lower than early reports of 20-30 hours that seemingly counted you playing RoboCop Rogue City several times.
There’s a bit of replayability to be had with this title, though it does lack a new game plus to carry over your skills or motherboards for your gun. Several choices you make affect who shows up down the road and even details a few different endings. With how involved things are, several runs of RoboCop Rogue City didn’t really entice me.
Come Quietly, Or There Will Be…Trouble!
RoboCop Rogue City plays like your usual first-person shooter, if a bit slowed down due to Murphy’s current leg predicament and lack of crouching or jumping capabilities. Your main sie arm is his famous handgun, but you can pick and carry around a second gun from foes, from magnums to rocket launchers
Copying the retro look of the movies, Murphy has his own form of vision that can identify foes in line of sight as well as important objects to interact with. His gun can also be modified with motherboards you find in the world, changing it from single fire to auto fire and even explosive ammo. Sadly, this makes me think too much of Judge Dredd.
As you take down criminals and complete quests you will be awarded experience points. Each 1,000 grants you a skill point to spend in Combat, Armour, Vitality, Engineering, Focus, Scanning, Deduction, and Psychology. These grant bonuses from increased damage to being able to charge your health from electricity boards.
Engineering and Deduction can be used for some discussions to give you an edge, though most can be subverted by finding evidence in the level. Another downer point is that Engineering is only used four times, and deduction once. The rest of the skills also do not factor in your investigations or discussions, making them fall into the background a lot. It feels like the developers were wanting to go down a more RPG route with some of these aspects but dropped them as soon as they were implemented.
The skills are weakened even more when their descriptive text is poorly worded and lacking details. The Scanning ability was meant to let you find important things on the map, but that only translates to some side missions and the main mission, plus the not-so-hidden chests. It doesn’t show you evidence or hidden caches, it even misses some side-quests that are single conversations.
A full run with all missions, even with a skill bonus from Deduction, will not let you max all your skills. I had 20 nodes left to unlock and that was with focusing Deduction to get the most out of the experience boost. I may have missed one or two side missions due to some poor map notations and skills, but I doubt I would have got 20,000 experience from those.
Psychology is also meant to increase your public trust points, but those are as far as I could tell a hidden metric. You never see how much you have. Those points also don’t seem to affect your ending much, maybe a few of the Fallout-style slides afterwards but it isn’t impactful enough to make you care about it.
The general design of RoboCop Rogue City is a linear progression hunt for clues. Your four visits to Downtown act more like a small sandbox for exploration and looking for hidden items, but most of the time you’re going through interiors or set-piece exteriors, all the while gunning down criminals. The two designs feel at war with each other, with a cooling down period spent in the precinct between each mission, and felt like the developers were at odds with what style of game they wanted to make.
They’ll Fix You. They Fix Everything.
The music of RoboCop Rogue City is very fitting to its source material. The introductory combat music is a redone version of the theme song of the movies, pulling heavily on nostalgia for anyone who watched them. However, the rest of RoboCop Rogue City features unique tracks to fit the scenes.
It’s a shame that a lot of the time you spend walking around you’ll only hear Murphy’s foot stomps and car alarms in the background. Making RoboCop Rogue City feel dead at times. The theme song does jump in again down the line, but it feels like they could have spent more time on the soundtrack to make it all-encompassing.
With Peter Weller making a return, a man who hit 76, RoboCop Rogue City is full of his personality as the robotic protagonist. It’s always nice to get the original cast rather than impersonators and brought a smile to my face hearing his voice again. Most of the cast makes a reappearance in face models only, with quite a few new additions to flesh out the story.
The difficulty of RoboCop Rogue City is a bit high, though this is more due to the slow movement of your character and lack of ducking and diving to be done. This is offset by increasing your armour or moving behind cover, but if you’re used to quick movements it might be a bit jarring. Later in RoboCop Rogue City, as you pick up more motherboards for your gun, you can turn the difficulty on its head, with one-shot kills or infinite ammo barrages.
It certainly seems clear the developers wanted RoboCop Rogue City to have a retro and classic look and feel. Even the opening menu reminds me of older titles back in the 80s and 90s. Sad to say this also bleeds into the dialogue and gameplay, making it feel dated in comparison to newer titles.
There are no innovations to be found, nor excitement abound with quest design. A lot of the interior buildings look copy-paste, with many quests lasting only a couple of minutes outside of reoccurring characters. Combined with the lacklustre use of the skill system, it feels like this title could have been released a decade ago to much higher praise.
Launching with quite a few bugs and glitches, some soft locking people into reloading an earlier autosave, RoboCop had a slippery start. At least the AI is passable, somewhat strong in quantity if not quality.
Overall, RoboCop Rogue City gets a 7/10. It’s a nice nostalgia hit to yesteryear but focuses too much on the classic and not the modern to make it entertaining enough. At £45 it could be worth the price, but with such a short runtime and unappealing replays, you might not get your money to an hour’s worth. There’s room for expansion and even DLCs, but I’d suggest you wait for more patches to fix the stability issues.
RoboCop Rogue City Launch Trailer
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