RoboCop: Rogue City (PlayStation 5)
Official GBAtemp Review
Product Information:
- Release Date (NA): October 2, 2023
- Release Date (EU): October 2, 2023
- Publisher: Nacon
- Developer: Teyon
- Genres: First-Person Shooter, RPG
- Also For: Computer, Xbox Series X|S
Game Features:
When Alex James Murphy was brutally shot to pieces by Clarence Boddicker, he was scraped back together by OCP and combined with robotic parts to become Bob Morton's cyborg officer we all admire. RoboCop: Rogue City (RRC) comprises an entirely new series of events, characters and storylines, set in the RoboCop universe, and none other than Peter Weller himself reprises his role as the titular law enforcer.
As a long-time RoboCop fan, I could not wait to assume the role of Robo and enforce the law in that beautifully violent Paul Verhoeven style. The iconic sounds, the cheesy lines, and the gritty 80s vision of the future have always appealed to me on so many levels, and now I could finally take on the character and blast my way to justice!
Your Move Creep.
RRC is placed somewhere between the second and third films and brings many well-known faces back into the limelight for another outing in Old Detroit. As the title suggests this is not purely an FPS gore-fest, instead, Teyon has opted to build a living breathing City for you to effectively role-play around, and actively live out your robotic fantasies as the titular Tin Man.
Not only are you tasked with gunning down hordes of Torchhead hooligan gang members led by Prodigy frontman wanna be: Soot, but you also have to serve and protect the citizens by way of solving murders, helping local store owners quandaries, training cadets, and yes: issuing parking tickets.
RRC plays like a super slow-paced FPS, which balances RoboCop's inability to get up to more than a fast walking speed with his tank-like heavily armoured stature. Teyon purposefully and lovingly made sure that the feel of the game wasn't too slow but also it doesn't adhere to modern FPS standards such as the ability to slide, wall run, or bound around the environment in a way that would detract from the core characters traits.
Come Quietly, Or There Will Be...Trouble!
Controlling RoboCop is 99.9% as expected for an FPS game these days, however, there are notably no jump or duck buttons. Instead, you have the Circle button to activate a shield or heal (if held down) and the Cross button activates a temporary dash ability when available. Movement is slow and chuggy, but that is what gives this game character. As you aim and fire with L2 and R2 respectively, enemies are highlighted with the signature green graphical outline we know and love, and because RoboCop is an absolute tank, he can take a massive beating before needing to regenerate health.
You have your trademark Auto 9 pistol for basic combat, with its unlimited rounds and clinical 3-round burst, and you can progressively unlock circuit boards and tech to enhance the devastation inflicted by it throughout the game. The upgrade process requires somewhat of a minigame, whereby parts you have collected have to be placed onto a circuit board in such a fashion that you maximise connections to any features and block off any nerfs. The collected pieces are similar to pipe connectors with connectors ranging from passthrough to four-way multidirectional parts, and capping end pieces to prevent connections to any power-reducing areas of the board.
While I found it rather baffling at first, after a few attempts I was able to enhance my accuracy and speed across multiple boards and consistently upcycle my parts into something better and more deadly.
I'd Buy That For a Dollar!
Along with your sidearm, you can carry one more weapon, and these are usually ones dropped or misplaced by NPCs. From shotguns to sniper rifles, there is a large range of weapons to play around with, and each deals damage on different scales depending on proximity and accuracy. The gibbing on this game is fantastic too, with heads exploding at every turn and limbs blowing off left, right and centre!
You can also pick up objects to throw at the bad guys. Launching TVs, chairs, landmines, and huge metal wheelie bins at people feels so good, it's remarkable. TVs explode and fizz with electricity, stunning and effectively tazing groups of enemies to the ground, whereas wheelie bins can be used as cover and then thrown at the last second to secure ground in oppressive sections.
You can also grab the bad guys and use them as cover, or throw them at others to inflict damage, but taking it one step further I threw enemies out of building windows only to watch them flail around as they fell multiple stories to the streets.
As mentioned before, combat gets more precise and more powerful the more you upgrade your core systems and your Auto 9, which helps you evolve with the character and adds more skills and buffs along the way. After a few missions, you get a dash move, a temporary shield, and the ability to slow down time. The latter is fantastic for regaining control in intense shootouts and is much needed when you are on your last legs.
The game also has an XP system whereby you can collect stolen items, choose dialogue to support, oppose or remain neutral to whomever you are interacting with and you can also dish out parking tickets, littering citations, and find small side quests for more experience. With this, you unlock skill points to populate your eight skill trees across areas such as Combat, Vitality, and interestingly: Psychology.
You Call This a Glitch?!
Visually the game is a nostalgic triumph. The silver-clad, neon-lit, 80s aesthetic that bleeds into "futuristic technology" is heavily abundant but then you have rotary phones and VHS players strewn across desks as if that area of technology has been neglected in this timeline, in favour of the ability to meld man with machine and produce incredible field-worthy AI with the ability to reason, identify millions of objects and wield lethal force in public.
Every surface is ray-traced, reflective, muddy, grimey, and filtered enough that you feel the connection to the franchise throughout, especially with the returning characters and familiar faces of the cast throughout the majority of the campaign. The character facial animation and lipsync are particularly nice in this game and the camera angles that draw across and swap to POV are definitely reminiscent of its big screen counterpart.
Holding the L2 button brings up your scanning mode so that you can identify clues, artefacts and any other details of interest. In doing so you are treated to a filtered CRT scan-line effect across your entire field of vision, once again encapsulating that RoboCop POV essence and drawing you yet deeper into assuming the role of Alex Murphy's cybernetic new form.
Each menu and location is filled with retcon to the RoboCop movie aesthetic and franchise nuances, and even the trophies are named accordingly and evoke the care and attention shown by the developers.
I also wanted to mention that thankfully you CAN turn off Robo's footstep sound! After several hours per sitting of "thud thud thud *gunshots* thud thud thud thud" you will begin to go insane, and so will your family, neighbours and passers-by, because it is so prominent in the default loadout that its twitch-inducing.
Character voices for random NPC's seemed overly cartoony, but longstanding characters and enemies sound bang on. Other than that the sound and effects are suitably perfect for this game with gun sounds being particularly punchy and general foley sounding particularly nice through Tempest 3D AudioTech using Pulse 3D headphones.
Graphically there are a few problems that rear their heads quite quickly in-game. Firstly and most jarringly, as the camera cuts from one character talking to another, you can see the characters load in for a split second. Sure, the game has a few other loading issues with textures coming in a little late in some places, and then the tertiary layers of detail popping in visibly after that, but I thought I was going mad because it was very very distracting, but so fast it's not apparent to everyone, but it was bugging the hell out of me. Initially, I thought I could see a corrupted low-poly version of the character for that millionth of a second, but after making a capture with a section of characters talking and playing it back in slow motion you can see that as the characters repeatedly load in they are in fact patchy and somehow 2D corrupted looking.
Another issue I encountered was that of progressive slowdown. The longer I played the slower and more jittery cut scenes became. Again I thought I was imagining it, and I captured a Police team brief speech given by Sergeant Warren Reed to verify. First I recorded it after 4-5 hours of gameplay where I was sure I could hear a choppy audio-stretching quality to the vocals. The second time around, I saved, closed the game and completely rebooted the console. I then reloaded the save and recorded the exact same section again. The difference was night and day, and I can only imagine that the longer you play the more glitchy it becomes, but 4-5 hours is not a heck of a lot considering other games I have played through for days on end and never encountered this level of weirdness before.
They'll Fix You. They Fix Everything.
During my playthrough which was honestly pretty awesome; I noticed a few really odd things like really crappy fetch quests for the $80-100 million dollar cyborg project to undertake. Things such as getting a get well soon card signed by multiple officers, finding the fuse box because the lights have gone out in the station, or finding a lost cat in a basement. Some of these felt like rudimentary tutorial missions, which would have been okay had I not already been several hours into the game, and others just felt like pointless filler. Fetching a towel in order to get someone out of the shower, to get them to then sign a card is a task for a work experience placement kid, not a superhuman law enforcement officer!
The psychological turmoil of Murphy is utilized well: undulating with the main story beats and each mission ending with a psych-evaluation in Robo's chair. The environments all feel like you're in the locations of the original movie with the smokey, misty, dirty settings encapsulating you, and the over-arching connection to the previous film is a pleasant touch that doesn't overdo it. As ever this review will not have given out any major spoilers, so it's all up to you to discover should you choose to pick this game up on November the 2nd!
RoboCop: Rogue City is a fantastic title with a few issues that don't entirely ruin your experience, but it would be nice if they simply weren't there at all. I'm sure with a little polish and feedback Teyon will bring the game up to standard and produce a flawless experience for RoboCop fans going forward, and honestly, I can't wait to see what updates and DLC come for this title!
Verdict
- Large city to explore with 30+ missions, 20+ side missions and 40 ish hours of gameplay
- Satisfying combat and upgrade system
- Nostalgia overload with Peter Weller's voice and likeness!
- RoboCop's footstep sounds CAN be turned off!
- Jittery audio after long periods of play
- Pop-in is distracting during cutscenes
