RoboCop: Rogue City Review

Robocop:

Games that are based on well-known franchises from comics and movies have been around since the beginning of gaming. Of course, the days of cash grab releases, which had to show off a well-known hero, with the gameplay limping, have largely passed, as evidenced by releases like Rocksteady’s Batman or Insomniac’s Spiderman.

Robocop: Rogue City falls into this category, and luckily the Polish company Teyon managed to give us an overall decent release.

The company has a relevant past with licensed games, having recently released Rambo: The Video Game and Terminator: Resistance. The truth is that we have had a long time to see a game with Robocop, since the days of the arcades and the Amiga.

Robocop: Rogue City made quite a splash when it was announced and thankfully the end result does justice to the creators and is definitely a step forward for Teyon, being her best release yet.

Story:

Special emphasis has been placed on the game’s story, which is set in time between the Robocop 2 and 3 films. Robocop / Alex Murphy has just stopped the drug dealer Cain and continues his daily duties as a Detroit police officer. But the ultimate drug Nuke continues to circulate on the streets, while a new big criminal appears, simply named The New Guy in Town… In our almost 20-hour adventure, we will of course try to serve the public, based on the 3 Prime Directives (Serve the Public Trust, Protect the Innocent, Uphold the Law).

There will be the conspiracies of OCP, the powerful multinational that has even bought the Detroit Police, while we will once again witness Robocop’s struggle to maintain his human side despite being trapped in the body of a Cyborg. It’s an extremely interesting subject, which had us thoroughly occupied mainly in the first film, although of course it never reached the unthinkable levels of a Terminator 2 or a Blade Runner.

In fact, to make things even more interesting, they offer in many parts of the game Mass Effect-style dialogue options, which to a lesser extent than the aforementioned but clearly present will affect the story, the attitude of the characters towards us and ultimately the end of the adventure. In other words, there are multiple endings, while depending on our answers we can turn the protagonist’s personality either towards the more impersonal and robotic or towards the more human and emotional. It’s an excellent choice of the creators to introduce these elements, which give much welcome variety and the necessary depth to the whole, elevating it above a typical first person shooter.

Gameplay:

Let’s slowly move on to the gameplay, which of course could not be far from that of a first-person shooter. After all, that’s what we think a friend of the character imagines or dreams of playing, which is to find himself in Robocop’s armor and neutralize the hordes of criminals plaguing near-future Detroit.

Fortunately, here too the developers gave us what they promised us, in other words rather the ultimate Robocop experience. The game is by no means the best shooter out there, nor is it up to the quality of a Game of the Year title. Some details, mainly of a technical nature, but we also imagine the lower budget of a smaller production team, hold it back a little.

On the other hand, the creators have achieved to an almost absolute degree the feeling of controlling an animated machine like Robocop. The character is heavy, but not too heavy. You feel his every step but at the same time it is not so slow that it slows down the action and the pace. There is no cover system and taking refuge behind pillars or walls to avoid enemy fire does not seem so natural. It’s much more fun to walk into a room with dozens of enemies and take them out one by one, ignoring enemy fire.

The feel of the weapons is very satisfying, with the highlight being Robocop’s default weapon, the familiar pistol kept in the holster on his leg. It has infinite spheres and after a point it is upgraded with new motherboards in which we put the appropriate chips that we will find while exploring the space. With these upgrades we can also eliminate the need to reload, turning the pistol into the ultimate weapon.

We can of course find other weapons by stealing them from the killed enemies. These are satisfying in variety and feel, while they will certainly help us at certain times.