The RoboCop franchise dates to over thirty years ago and with the 2014 remake being a failure, should be considered dead. Yet here we have a new videogame based on the original films that has been well received by critics and achieved modest commercial success. The game works of course by mining old timers’ nostalgia for the original films but it also plays off of our fond memories of old-school shooter games. Its production values aren’t top of the line, it’s janky in parts and its story and lines of dialogue are a little too derivative of the films. On the other, it very much feels like RoboCop and as I’ve always said, it’s okay to be good enough so to me this is an absolute gem of a game.
Sometime in between the events of the second and the third film, RoboCop is already an established figure when Detroit is threatened by the arrival of a crime boss known only as the New Guy. In a bid to work for the New Guy, a gang called the Torch Heads attacks a television news studio and takes hostages. RoboCop deals with the gangsters but a momentary hesitation is caught on cameras when he hallucinates Alex Murphy’s wife. Back at the police station, OCP assigns executive Max Becker as RoboCop’s overseer and installs a monitoring chip inside him to troubleshoot the glitches. RoboCop is also required to attend sessions with psychiatrist Olivia Blanche. The police track the Torch Heads to an abandoned slaughterhouse where their leader Soot is holding an underground rave. After RoboCop fights through hordes of gangsters, he reaches Soot only to have him be killed by the New Guy for attracting police attention. The New Guy identifies himself as Wendell Antonowsky, the brother of one of the men who killed Alex Murphy. He is somehow able to cause RoboCop to malfunction again, shoots RoboCop’s partner Anne Lewis, and escapes.
It might be necessary to refresh your memory of the plot of the films because all of the same characters and even plot elements are back. Peter Weller voices RoboCop, OCP is once again both owns the police and is the ultimate villain and you will inevitably fight at least one ED-209 unit. Unfortunately while Anne Lewis makes an appearance, the story fridges her fairly early on so she doesn’t play much of a role. In her place there are a number of original characters who each have their own development arcs. The story beats are the usual ones of RoboCop trying his best to fight crime while being undermined by OCP and having to deal with memories of his previous life. It might seem too derivative but I think it works really well as it has probably been a long time since anyone has watched the films. It also captures the sliminess of OCP. The police all know that they’re greedy and unethical as hell but nailing them with evidence of actual crimes is something else entirely.
The gameplay is pure old-school shooter except that you are controlling RoboCop so forget about being agile and sprinting all over the place. Instead RoboCop ambles clunkily across the map, trusting in his innate toughness to tank enemy attacks. You can pick up and use the weapons enemies drop but why would you when you have the signature Auto-9 gun. You have infinite ammunition for it and a neat mini-game lets you extensively customize its capabilities as you pick up chips for it over the course of the game. The game doesn’t hold back on the gore, so you can blow the brains off perps or turn their limbs to salsa. You can also grab enemies to use them as human shields and toss around heavy objects with your cybernetic arms. Skill upgrades unlock additional abilities, such as a short dash, hacking enemy turrets, slowing time. If you keep improving your armor for example, you eventually get to a point where most small arms fire just bounce off of you.
Since the vast majority of enemies in it are ordinary humans, this game isn’t truly challenging most of the time even when you’re facing hordes of attackers. You’re very tough and healing items are plentiful. Against something like the ED-209, you’d still need to duck into cover once in a while and pick up heavier weapons. The game also features some new enemies of an original design which I won’t spoil here but they’re unfortunately rather generic and aesthetically uninteresting. Finally there is surprising a decent amount of out-of-combat gameplay as well. Downtown Detroit is represented in the form of a large open map in which you get to investigate crimes and help citizens. It’s a little silly but you can have RoboCop issuing parking tickets and solving random murders that are unrelated to the main story. The quality of these optional activities isn’t that great but it’s kind of surprising that they even exist as I’d have expected this to be a more or less linear shooter.
The same mediocre quality permeate the entire game. The graphics feel last-gen. Downtown Detroit looks decent at first glance but is strangely empty. The voice work is very uneven and I found it impossible to make out many lines of dialogue. One enemy type, the gangsters riding motorcycles, are a nice idea but don’t seem to really work. They just seem to ride in circles and are easy to pick off from a distance. This is very much not an AAA game. Yet as I’ve said many times, games shouldn’t have to always try to be the best in class to be successful. They only have to be good enough and have a good hook. In this and for me, RoboCop: Rogue City is a smashing success. The very unexpectedness of reviving this old IP works in its favor and it so very faithfully recreates that world, warts and all. It’s so dumb that this is a world with killer robots and cybernetic cops, yet the computer monitors are all old-style CRTs and there’s a video rental store that is full of VCR tapes. Dumb but also so 1980s, so RoboCop and therefore so much fun.
