RoboCop: Rogue City (PC) Review

Superficially, Robocop is a robot and a man. He carries a gun. It would be a relatively short mental leap to slot these distinctive ingredients into a pre-existing, straight-on linear shooter template. Get in, get out; take it to the bank. All common logic would place almost any modern organisation settling on that design solution, which, though it might have its own merits, lacks the nuance to reflect some of the IP's original appeal. It'll come as a surprise then that Robocop: Rogue City doesn't do this and instead opts for a more considered design that buttresses the cadence of its action, largely successfully, and reflects that said original appeal in lots of smart and thoughtful ways. It could be represented in the lite RPG mechanics that the title incorporates, the return of original voice talent, an occasional minigame or easter-egg here and there, or, really, just the confidence to slow itself right the heck down. Sure, the shooting is in there, and in spades, it'd be insane not to be, but during the interstitial sections Robocop might also find himself assisting co-workers with menial tasks or essentially working as an on-beat cop issuing parking tickets to unsuspecting civilians; something which could be argued is more thrilling than shooting goons in the nuts repeatedly, back-to-back. It makes you feel like Spiderman and illustrates that developer Teyon has a deft grasp on, and respect for, the source material and the character of Robocop.

Because of this, levels have more variety and don't necessarily always take on the shape that one would expect, alternating between slower, exploratory moments in small-ish semi-open-world areas and tighter, linear shooting gallery experiences. These parts blend into each other fairly organically throughout the run-time of Rogue City, assisting the pacing of the campaign and, although this statement is to be corroborated, it feels like levels never follow quite the same structure twice.

The shooting is visceral and weighty. Gore is dialled up to eleven; environments destruct, leaving most in total chaos after a shootout and Robocop moves slowly and can absorb a lot of damage, the way it should be. This aspect of Robocop could have easily fallen into a trap of feeling plodding or slow-moving but thankfully maps feel designed around this limitation and it's refreshing in an FPS not to immediately have to prioritise taking cover as most enemies can just be dealt with head-on. Again, it's something that Teyon really struck on the right balance of making Robocop feel OP in most situations but then does introduce some challenge later on with enemy variety, numbers and more than a few rock-vs-tight space type scenarios.

The look and feel of everything are bang on the money, with particular stand-outs in Robocop: Rogue City being the excellent environmental and lighting design; evidence that there's some real talent that worked on this title. Assets and character models are reused quite liberally across Robocop: Rogue City, however rather than seeming like a scoping constraint it often makes a lot of sense within the context of the story and due to maps being so well designed and detailed it's a pleasure to return to one, for example, at a different time of day.

There are downsides as well and that chiefly comes in the form of many bugs. The most egregious of which during this review playthrough was that at dialogue interactions the game would consistently load in an additional Robocop character model with its associated collision box in the active character or camera's place, which then would remain loaded indefinitely. Nine times out of ten this was equally mildly annoying and amusing, but that additional 10% of instances did also create a few softlocks to progress, which then had to be manually reloaded to fix. General texture loading issues, clipping issues and menus that don't operate as expected persist noticeably so elsewhere. It's a huge black mark on a title that generally has got a lot right in its design but even at its worst isn't enough to temper the overall enjoyment of role playing as Robocop. One would hope that these issues will eventually get patched out too, and ironically it does kind of fit with the IP's B-movie tone.