Robocop: Rogue City Review

While I did get some enjoyment out of Terminator Resistance, if I wasn't a Terminator fan, I would be much more harsh on it. Now the same developer has made a similar style of game but for the Robocop IP and for the most part I would say this is an improvement over Resistance. All though not without some occasional issues along the way. I was looking forward to the game when it got announced since the idea of playing a hitscan shooter where you play as a slow moving tank fits the idea of a Robocop shooter more than many games that attempt the idea.

I'll start with what I liked. If you are one of those people who are tired of boomer shooters in the indie space and AAA big budget open world games when it comes to FPS games coming out now. Outside of Trepang2, Rogue City is a shooter that harkens back to the shooters of the 00s like Soldier of Fortune and FEAR. The gore and over the top violence is especially remiscent of SoF especially if you use the .50 cal magnum and get headshots with it, the amount of over the top gore and violence when shoot enemies adds great verserial feedback to combat and it fits the Robocop series like a glove.

You also have environment destruction with bullets shredding through everything and if you choose to spend points on it, a slo mo ability that is like FEAR's. So if you like either of these two games, and are looking for something akin to those games, Rogue City is worth checking out for that alone. Just don't expect enemy AI as good as FEAR's with that said.

The comparisons to other games don't stop there either, the game can also be compared to the recent Deus Ex games but instead of being, "good guy" or "bad guy", you get Murphy to either act more human or act more like a robot that is owned by OCP. It makes for a fascinating a dilemma that the character has to deal with on a day to day basis and it makes for an interesting, "a day in the life of Robocop" that the player gets to act out. Some of the side quests are interesting too even though I didn't do all of them since side quests in games are kind of like filler to me.

The story overall is pretty well written for a midquel. It does a good job at exploring Murphy's humanity as well as having some decent villains like Wendell Antonosky and despite his limited screen time the Old Man. The other characters like Anne Lewis and Sergeant Reed are in character despite being written by different writers. New characters like Ulysses Washington are pretty engaging too with how he slowly starts to earn the police force and by extension Murphy's trust. Olivia Blanche is also decently written and she does a good job at making the player by extension reflect on what the character does at the end of every chapter as well as tying into a twist later in the game. Peter Weller's voice acting is also quite good and he was directed pretty well. He's both stoic and robotic but also endearing at the same time much like in the first two Robocop movies.

On to the stuff I didn't like, the cutscenes are very stifly animated and don't look very good even by comparison to PS2 and 3 games. All the characters move and are animated like they have a hard time even taking a step, they are almost like cyborgs like the titular character except they are humans which doesn't really work that well. This can be pretty distracting especially in a story driven game driven by cutscenes and dialogue like this game is.

The AI is pretty dumb, almost to comical degrees, you could argue like the enemies standing around or just moving around occasionally and stuff like the ED 209 fights being beaten by hiding behind vans and walls is fitting of the franchise but it doesn't really make for consistently interesting combat encounters.

This leads me to my final big issue is that the game can feel a little too long. The game at first does a good job at throwing in different enemy types like armoured enemies, snipers, motorbike enemies, drones, grenade launcher enemies, the game at around the halfway point looses steam and basically just has enemies be challenging because they can take a significent amount of bullets to kill. There isn't much to fights other than to hide behind cover, pop out, shoot, wait for health to regen(this is especially made easier if you unlock the ability to regen 75% health), but the game suffers from many shooters of this type suffer from in that, there is no reliable way to avoid enemy fire outside of hiding behind cover, and there isn't a whole lot of ways of dispatching them outside of shooting them later in the game. The slo mo ability kind of helps but enemies take way too much damage to kill them consistently with.

Overall, Rogue City is a good game is worth checking out for people who love gory over the top shooters and especially Robocop fans. I was expecting the game to be a flawed but good time and I got just that.