RoboCop: Rogue City Review – I’d Buy That For 60 Dollars

Despite being a RoboCop fan, the rough gaming adaptations that most ‘80s films have gotten in the past made reluctant to get excited about Rogue City from Teyon. Sure, it could be another Alien: Isolation or Mad Max, but it’s more likely that it turns out like Aliens: Dark Descent or Rambo: The Video Game.

RoboCop’s iconic grotesque action should make it the perfect ‘80s movie to turn into a video game, but I’ve been burned before. However, after checking out Rogue City at Gamescom earlier this year, its surprisingly punchy combat and deep RPG-esque mechanics turned it into the biggest surprise of the show for me.

Rogue City manages to fulfil its prime directive of being the best RoboCop simulator out there, and happily sits alongside some of the best licensed games in recent memory thanks to its understanding of the character, entertaining gameplay, and oodles of fan service.

The game tells an original story that takes place between the second and third films, and sees RoboCop going up against a mysterious villain called the “New Guy” who is later revealed to be related to a figure from his past. The plot is fairly standard (and correct) ACAB stuff that captures the original film’s satirical take on what our world might look like in the distant future and how megacorporations like Disney, uh I mean OCP, will rule the world someday, but it’s Rogue City’s understanding of RoboCop as a character that makes it shine.

Peter Weller does a fantastic job returning to the iconic iron nappy, perfectly recapturing Robo’s mix of badass catchphrases and monotone hilarity. As funny as he is, Rogue City understands that he’s also a tragic and complicated figure who’s stuck between a man and a machine. We still get to see him call criminals “slime” and “dirtbag”, but we also get a more in-depth look at his personality and struggles through psychological evaluations and malfunctions that dive into his past. It’s one of the best looks at the actual character of RoboCop we’ve seen since the original film.

When you’re not musing over whether RoboCop should be treated as a human, you’ll spend most of your time in Rogue City shooting the ever-loving shit out of anyone that crosses your path. Just like cops nowadays, Robo is a shoot-first-ask-questions-later kind of guy, which means that pretty much every situation is resolved with a firefight, whether it’s a trip to the video store with a friend or helping an old lady find her cat.

Spending so much time shooting slimeballs isn’t a bad thing at all, though, as Rogue City’s responsive and weighty gunplay makes you feel just as powerful as Alex Murphy. Combat goes surprisingly deep here thanks to the customisable skill tree, with Robo able to do much more than just blow up brains and balls with the Auto-9, like picking up and chucking around enemies, firing shots that bounce off walls, protecting himself with a human shield, and more. He also can’t move faster than a light jog, but that’s the trade-off for being a human tank who is near unstoppable in most scenarios.

As satisfying as it is to shoot every enemy you see in the groin and then throw their friend out of the nearest window, what surprised me the most about Rogue City is that my favourite moments were when the Auto-9 was holstered. Despite controlling a character that is known for his robotic personality and love for bloody violence, you spend a lot of time choosing between dialogue options in Rogue City, with the choices you make having an impact on the story and what parts of the character you come to uncover in the quieter instances.

Sometimes the choices you make are more for flavour, but a lot of the time you’re choosing between being a RoboCop that closely follows the law or one that has more of Alex Murphy in him and serves the public first and foremost. Dialogue choices also change how some key characters view you, such as a plucky young police officer who can become closer to RoboCop if you give him the chance to prove himself, and a reporter who can give Robo a tape of him malfunctioning instead of airing it on TV if you earn his trust and make the right, or in some cases wrong, calls.

It’s not exactly clear from a single playthrough of Rogue City how much of it changes based on your decisions, but what I saw was enough to make me want to go back and give it a go as a more robotic RoboCop than the empathetic one I opted for. I would be more likely to do that if there wasn’t so much bloat here to deal with between the compelling combat and narrative.

Like Alex Murphy facing down a shotgun-wielding slimeball, Rogue City’s biggest problem is that it doesn’t know when to quit. It took me around 24 hours to beat the campaign, which included doing most of the side missions that popped up and, by that time, Rogue City had started to overstay its welcome somewhat.

The big shooting gallery levels simply drag on a bit by the end, especially thanks to some annoying difficulty spikes that had me hiding behind walls a lot more than I’d like as the protector of New Detroit. Although roleplaying as RoboCop never gets old, 20-plus hours of shooting is bound to get a bit repetitive no matter how cool it is to kill lousy thugs by chucking motorbikes at them.

Even if Rogue City had started to rust a little towards the end of its lengthy campaign, its surprisingly in-depth shooting and roleplaying mechanics, love of the source material, and keen understanding of what makes RoboCop so great in the first place has made it one of the biggest surprises of 2023 for me. In a year full of absolute bangers, make sure you spend some time in Detroit.

RoboCop: Rogue City

Reviewed on PS5.

Pros

• Satisfying combat makes you feel like RoboCop
• Great understanding of Robocop as a character
• Surprising RPG mechanics

Cons

• Overstays its welcome
• Bugs and jank

Score: 3.5/5. A PS5 code was provided by the publisher.