I’ve always had a particular affection for ‘B’ games. You know the type, they’re the ones that maybe cost ten or fifteen bucks less than your average marquee blockbuster and look just that little bit cheaper in action too.
These typically aren’t games that will ever ‘wow’ you, but at their best they will execute on a specific vision really damn well.
RoboCop: Rogue City is my absolute favourite ‘B’ game of the year.
RoboCop: Rogue City Review
Polish developers Teyon released Terminator Resistance back in 2019, a shooter-RPG based on another iconic 80’s robot movie license. Despite clearly being of modest budget, the team went above and beyond what the assignment demanded.
They delivered a far more mechanically and narratively complex experience than anyone would have expected and with a perfectly nailed future war tone to boot. It was without a doubt the absolute best and most lovingly authentic Terminator game ever.
My affection for that game and the lifelong love I’ve had for the first two RoboCop movies had me eagerly awaiting Rogue City all year, but the trailers also left me with a sense that I pretty much knew what to expect from it. It turns out I was right because Rogue City pretty much apes the design and structure of Resistance entirely.
The core loop sees you spend some time at the police precinct talking to people and moving the plot along before you head out to an open hub area on a mission. When that mission is complete you can head back to the precinct and repeat.
If the core story is all you’re focused on then you’ll end up completing Rogue City in about 10 hours, but the real joy here is in how packed with fun side-quests, collectable hunts, and opportunities to deepen character relationships each of these excursions are.
How much you engage with these side activities and the choices you make in them will also have an enormous effect on the many possible permutations of the game’s ending. They also significantly impact the game’s overall difficulty curve as they give XP vital to developing Robo’s talent build and will frequently lead you to mod nodes and circuit boards used to customize Robo’s sidearm.
While I didn’t find this design framework to be as surprisingly impressive this time around, it’s a solid formula that I was perfectly pleased to revisit.
Excuse me, I have to go. Somewhere there is a crime happening.
The whole adventure takes place right in between RoboCop 2 and, (ugh), 3. The core of Rogue City’s story is… fine. Teyon has done an impressive job of narratively bridging the two films when there wasn’t a whole lot of room to do so, but it’s not a particularly memorable tale in and of itself.
Its biggest issue is that its villains suck, which feels like a cardinal sin given the IP. I had no expectation that we’d get anything even close to RoboCop’s Clarence Boddicker or even 2’s Cain here, but the decision to not introduce Rogue City’s until several hours in is a truly baffling one given how early and how strongly their presence is known in those two films.
As I said though, the side activities are the true joy here, and they’re what I’ll remember most fondly of all. It’s walking around downtown Detroit issuing parking tickets and telling graffiti artists to move along. It’s getting a call to help investigate a stolen car, which leads to gathering witness testimonies, investigating a motive, and having a fittingly obscene orgy of gun violence dished out by Robo in the middle of it all for good measure.
It’s taking a ‘get well soon!’ card around the precinct for fellow officers to sign. It’s rescuing a cat from a burning building. All of the in-between police work that makes up the bulk of Robo’s day is only hinted at in the movies. It’s all delightful, and when Rogue City is acting as this kind of RoboCop simulator, it’s at its best and often also its most darkly humorous.
The genuinely stunning level of detail put into recreating sets, costumes, props and sounds from the films makes it all the better. However, the fact that likeness rights to a surprising amount of the series’ cast are present but only Robo himself is voiced by the actual actor is disappointing.
I know that a couple of the actors in question are long dead of course, but the fact that their replacements make little attempt to sound like them while inhabiting their virtual skin is a jarring choice.
What are your Prime Directives?
Despite its larger than you’d expect depth and amount of side content, RoboCop: Rogue City is still a budget, ‘B’ game. You’ll revisit many of the same locations multiple times throughout the journey, though I’d argue that this is actually just a sensible production scope.
Nothing about its bells and whistles will blow you away, though I’d argue it all looks extremely nice. It’s just an extremely video game-ass video game in the absolute best, throwback kind of sense. There are no microtransactions. I encountered zero bugs or performance issues even on pre-release, and the whole shebang is a perfectly digestible 30-hour maximum.
Teyon set out to make a damn authentic and utterly enjoyable RoboCop game to a reasonable scale and budget and it absolutely delivered. I can’t honestly say that it’s one of the best games of the year, but it might truly be the one that I’ve had the most fun with from beginning to end.
It’s as clear with RoboCop as it was with Terminator that Teyon takes on these licenses because it truly loves them and absolutely understands them. Despite obvious budget constraints and a few shortfalls in each, I absolutely cannot wait to see what the team does with this license formula next.
RoboCop: Rogue City was reviewed on Xbox Series X using digital code provided by Nacon.
