RoboCop: Rogue City Review

Rogue City is a much-needed reminder of why I play games.

Every year, a long-awaited, highly scored AAA title like Spider-Man 2 (2023) comes out. I play it, and I hate it, and I am forced to ask myself a question:

Why do I still play games?

Despite a tidal wave of critical effulgence, the writing nauseates me. The gameplay bores. The world aggravates. Nothing stands out from the miasma of mediocrity, and I’m left angry and irritated, rather than entertained and excited.

After Hogwarts: Legacy, System Shock, Starfield, and Spider-Man 2 this year, I was beginning to wonder if I had simply aged out of singleplayer games. Why do I keep playing them if they, inevitably, make me annoyed?

Then, on a whim, with no expectations at all, I buy something like Robocop: Rogue City, and I remember why. I remember why I bought a PS5. I remember why I’ve always loved games.

Rogue City

RoboCop: Rogue City is a singleplayer first person shooter/action/investigation roleplaying game where you assume the role Alex Murphy, the RoboCop, as he fights crime on the streets of Detroit. Peter Weller reprises his eponymous role from the original film; despite being the only returning cast member, the story takes place shortly after RoboCop 2, and features the film series’ characters extensively.

Rogue City begins as a shooter. A shooter is more or less all I expected going in. Yet as the game expands, it becomes readily apparent that shooting is only one small part of the experience. RoboCop is, after all, a cop, and cops have plenty of duties beyond violence.

Ticket cars parked in violation of traffic laws. Fine homeless men for public intoxication. Gather clues, take statements, and rescue kittens from burning buildings. And then, once all else is taken care of, break out your Auto 9 and get sweeping.

The parallels between Rogue City and this year’s earlier Aliens: Dark Descent are spooky. Both are European-developed licensed games based on 1980s American action movies; both are startlingly original; and both are best described in the following terms:

Rogue City is like L.A. Noire if Cole Phelps was a SPARTAN super soldier. It combines the hub-based level design of Deus Ex 3 with the more linear mission structure of Wolfenstein: The New Order, where there’s always a story-focused home base to return to after a mission has been completed. Like Deus Ex, it’s a roleplaying game, with an interactive narrative, upgrades, and skill trees, but the primary gameplay loop fundamentally comes down to blasting the shit out of creeps, three bullets at a time, as best analogized to the original Halo games.

And it’s fucking awesome.

I’ve played games “like” Rogue City before. Halo, LA: Noire, the new Wolfensteins, and Deus Ex. It’s highly evocative of Deus Ex 3 in particular, as you play a cyborg cop working for a private company in Detroit. DE3 stole from RoboCop; now RoboCop steals back from Deus Ex.

But much as how Dark Descent created an original game through the fusion of several different genres, RoboCop: Rogue City takes ideas from these franchises and remixes them into something extremely unique. I had played Spider-Man 2 at least twice before I loaded it up on my PS5—but I’ve never played Rogue City before.

Most missions are centered around a hub. Murphy is sent to a neighborhood, a hospital, or an old factory, and there he must Serve the Public Trust while Protecting the Innocent. You’ll have to look for clues regarding your main quest, to take down the New Guy in town, or simply wander around for a while and hope there’s a crime somewhere to interrupt.

Don’t worry. It’s Detroit. You’ll find some rape in progress or armed robbery before long.

I was repeatedly amazed by the level design in the hubs. There are mountains of events and conversations to find, all of which can be easily missed without a bit of police vigilance. Major side quests are always placed at the exact right location on the map so that they are discovered naturally while avoiding backtracking, yet aren’t shown off to such an extent that they feel forced down your throat. This, combined with the feeling that there’s always something out there to find, lends Rogue City a sense of real exploration.

I always wanted to look around, because I knew I would find something worth finding. Meaningful upgrades, engaging narrative, or more parts for my pistol; nothing could be taken for granted. All could be missed.

Please contrast this with Spider-Man 2.

There’s a bit too much wandering around at times, and I think there could’ve been fewer quests in some of the zones. And while open-ended, the hubs are nothing like what you’d find in a Deus Ex or Dishonored game; they’re straightforward and, if not linear, then the next closest thing.

But they fit neatly within the narrative. Its semi-openness enhances and goes alongside the main quest. These two things feel as though they belong together.

Gunplay is what should be expected. RoboCop is a dick-blasting badass, capable of sustaining immense damage from small arms fire. Four unique abilities can be unlocked through the skill trees—an overshield, a charge, a stun, and bullet time—but shooting is mostly as simple as aiming and pulling the trigger.

Uniquely, the weapon systems of the game only allows you to pick up one gun at a time. The other is your Auto 9, which must always stay equipped. The Auto 9 can be upgraded through circuit boards and a small puzzle-ish minigame, which allows it to take on the role of a sniper pistol, a submachine pistol, an assault pistol, or, in the end, a grenade launcher pistol.

I can’t think of another game that’s done its weapon management like this. It’s reminiscent in places of Republic Commando, but really quite different.

The Auto 9 sends enormous jets of blood and gore. It’s reliable, and with infinite ammo, it’s your main weapon for all scenarios. The additional weapons that can be found on corpses are more varied; I found them to be too weak, generally, with a few standouts: the shotguns are worthless, while the Desert Eagle is ludicrously powerful. The assault rifles never had enough ammo, and the snipers are hard to land hits with.

But when the end of the game comes about and you find yourself picking up a Cobra Assault Cannon and getting to work, you’ll be content with how the weapons shake out.

What makes the gunplay stand out despite its simplicity is the visceral feedback of the violence. Shoot a thug in the arm, blow it off. He’ll stand around for a while, screaming, “Oh my god, you shot off my arm!” before eventually collapsing to the ground. Heads pop like balloons filled with blood. Robot enemies, like in Fallout 4, have their heads blown apart and their innards revealed with each bullet. Cover is destructible, and has a habit of blowing to pieces whenever shooting starts; I think Rogue City might have the best destructible environments of any game ever made.

In other words, the violence in this game has exactly what I complained about Starfield lacking: impact. And while there isn’t much to holding down the right trigger and blowing hordes of thugs to pieces, dear God, it’s fucking fun.

I’m a bit less enthusiastic about the investigative gameplay. It’s similar to The Witcher 3, without the real depth of L.A. Noire: run around, look at stuff, press X occasionally, talk to people. It’s impossible to miss anything if you look around for long enough. The conversation system is also about as barebones as they come, but it is functional—I would analogize it to the original Deus Ex, but with more variety in voice lines.

But where Rogue City truly excels is in enemy variety. There are at least two extremely different gangs, multiple robots, and a mercenary company to fight, each with unique special enemies and their own effects and weaponry. This, more than anything else, keeps the gameplay fresh, and forces you to always adapt your strategies to the situation at hand.

Skill trees were not what I expected from this game. These aren’t much as trees, I suppose, since they don’t branch, but they’re close enough to share the word.

The upgrades contained within these trees are significant and gameplay-altering. Each is fun and useful, and the only tree that doesn’t have some utility is Psychology—which, to be frank, I don’t understand the purpose of. Armor and Vitality, as well as Engineering, Focus, and Combat, all are vital to upgrade. I played on Hard, and the power contained within each major node was enough to persuade me that I never wanted to miss out on XP.

Thus the skill tree lends a strong incentive to explore, which then back into the narrative and the primary gameplay loop.

This is what designers should be striving to do.

RoboCop: The RPG

In addition to all it’s doing above, Rogue City somehow manages to also be an excellent roleplaying game.

From the very start, you’ll be expected to make decisions for Murphy. Are you Murphy, or are you RoboCop? Are you a man, or are you a machine? One significant story element concerns which candidate you’ll endorse for mayor, and countless small decisions—about whether to uphold the law or let an offender go—pervade the entire game.

For a first-person shooter, the story is astonishingly reactive to your choices. What you say and do will make an impact by the end. The main narrative doesn’t branch, but the sidequests do, and you have a major say in what shape the people of Detroit are in by the end of the story. The post-game resolution slideshow a la Fallout somehow manages to be infinitely more satisfying than the ending of Baldur’s Gate 3, and the penultimate mission, as Murphy and I said our peace to our friends in the police force, was absolutely resplendent.

Not that the story itself is anything brilliant. RoboCop is one of the best movies ever made, and the love the developers had for the first two movies is apparent everywhere throughout the game. There are constant references, and the environments from the first film especially have been painstakingly recreated digitally. Walking around the police station truly feels like stepping into the original film. From Anne Lewis to the Old Man, you’ll be seeing lots of familiar faces.

But being one of the best movies ever made, RoboCop’s unique Verhoeven style, with its distinctive dialogue, surreal wit, and biting satire, is more or less impossible to replicate.

The writers of Rogue City made a good attempt. They’re Polish, and it shows through the dialogue: some of it is completely unintelligible, despite American VAs voicing every line. Three or four times throughout the game I heard lines that I couldn’t decipher no matter how much thinking I did, and far more frequently I found conversations to be disjointed and confusing.

These constitute a minority of the dialogues. Most of the writing is actually fairly solid, and far above average for a game of this caliber. I’m amazed at how well Murphy, Lewis, and the Old Man were captured in their speech, even if it’s not always quite right. The new original characters like Ulysses Washington are surprisingly compelling, too; I was shocked when I found myself actually caring about what happened to them (and him in particular). This is a major accomplishment for any video game.

Where the writing stumbles most is in humor. The narrative designers weren’t able to replicate Verhoeven’s jokes, and most of the comedy—although not all—falls flat.

Bad humor is usually unbearable. Yet somehow Rogue City’s manages to mostly only be bizarre. The jokes are probably poorly translated from Polish, and they’re often so inept that they can only inspire laughter at the attempt. Given the circumstances, I think this was about as best as could be hoped for.

While the dialogue varies, the performances of the main cast do not. Anne Lewis’ VA—whose name I can’t find, but who I don’t believe is the original actress—is unbelievably good. Every line reading is slick and engaging. It’s some of the best voice work I’ve ever seen in a game. The same is true for the main villain and Ulysses Washington. These actors do a ton of lifting to bring the story up to near-Hollywood standards.

Side characters are more haphazardly acted. Thug enemies especially aren’t much to write about, and I felt like Peter Weller didn’t quite give the role his all—he often sounds disjointed in his responses to the other characters. But where it matters, the developers delivered.

The main storyline itself is doing its best to imitate a hypothetical third RoboCop movie starring Peter Weller. I think something more ambitious would have been better in the long-run, but as a fan of the movies, I would say Rogue City is generally successful. The plot is contrived and frustrating in places, and much of it feels like a retread of the first movie. There’s no real sense that Murphy’s arc of coming to accept his identity as a human has ever happened.

But as a stand-alone story of a robot cop coming to grips with his life and fighting slime, it works. The narrative flows and mostly makes sense, and the ending is absolutely hilarious. I don’t want to spoil anything more than I have already, because I really do think that any fan of the first movie should go out and buy this game right way.

And if you’re not a fan of the first movie, what the fuck is wrong with you? Go watch it and change that fact. It’ll only take you 100 minutes.

It Just Works

2023 has been a decent year for games but a bad year for technology. Every major title I’ve played this year has been marred by significant bugs.

Rogue City has its own share. But I’m happy to report that they aren’t too bad. For the most part.

I experienced no crashes and only got stuck once, after a missile from an ED-209 knocked Murphy halfway inside of a wall and I couldn’t get out. This is better than I can say for Starfield and Spider-Man 2 on both counts.

But audio issues plague the game, especially starting from about halfway through. Voices become robotic and poorly filtered. Sound cuts out and falls out of sync. Voice lines begin skipping themselves, and music overpowers speech.

This is especially notable in the hub areas. There is no ambience whatsoever in the streets of Detroit. No music. No sound. No voices, unless you come up close to an NPC and hear what he has to say. Whether it’s due to a glitch or bad design, I can’t say—but it’s shocking to walk down a dark alley without so much as crickets in the background or a dim ambient track.

A tiny amount of ambient music could have turned Rogue City into a master class of atmosphere, to rival Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. Without it, it’s often jarring, and feels cheap.

I desperately hope this is patched, as well as the other audio issues. I have a suspicion it will be.

The graphics themselves vary. I played on PS5, exclusively on performance mode, and often had FPS drops—some down below 30, which is really unacceptable. For the most part it looked good, though, especially with reflections. The environments are detailed and look almost as bad as real-life Detroit, and for what is effectively a AA game, I was satisfied with appearances.

Buy It

Rogue City is excellent. It’s compelling and unique, and despite an outer layer of jank, has had a ton of thought put into its story, quests, and gameplay. Games like this, unpretentious and passionate, are the soul of the industry. They are the rare titles that are not afraid to be fun.

And they are fun. Everywhere you go, Rogue City simply wants to entertain. There’s no tedium. There are no real shitty minigames. There is a lot of talking, but for every word said, five bullets will be fired soon enough. The narrative is fulfilling and never depressing. It’s just fun.

By the time the end of the game comes, and you’re fending off hordes of criminal scum while the classic RoboCop theme blares, it’s impossible not to be smiling. And isn’t that what games are about?

So buy this game. I haven’t decided whether I like it more than Dark Descent yet, but it says a lot that the two are neck-and-neck in my mind for GotY. I guess it turns out that, in my heart, the only thing I love half so much as 80s action cinema is Eurojank. The two together are unstoppable.