This spoiler-free review will cover the video game RoboCop: Rogue City. Relive a classic RoboCop experience by playing as Robocop yourself in a first-person shooter format! You’ll be able to protect the innocent, uphold the law, and save Detroit from new gangs causing mayhem!
Robocop is Back
It has been seven years since we’ve last seen RoboCop in a movie, the last being RoboCop in 2014. However, he has made more recent appearances in video games, such as Mortal Kombat 11 as a DLC character, where he was voiced by his original actor, Peter Weller.
If you’re a Robocop fan, you’ll be happy to know that Peter Weller is reprising his role as RoboCop for RoboCop: Rogue City.
With Peter Weller being age 76 during the release of Rogue City, one might think his performance would suffer due to his age. However, this is far from the truth as Peter Weller has done an excellent job at playing RoboCop Once more!
You’ll encounter both old and new characters from the RoboCop franchise. This includes Officer Anne Lewis and Sergeant Reed. There will be new characters for RoboCop to interact with as one might imagine, the Detroit Police Department’s turnover rate is quite high in the RoboCop setting.
With that said, let’s get onto the story of RoboCop: Rogue City.
The Story
If you’re curious about where Rogue City fits into the timeline of the RoboCop franchise, it takes place after the events of RoboCop 2 but before RoboCop 3. With the Boddicker Gang and Nuke Cult out of the picture, new gangs formed to fill in the void caused by the power vacuum.
The narcotic known as “Nuke”, introduced in RoboCop 2, still has a heavy presence in Detroit as it still has a grip on the citizens of Detroit. You’ll be able to find Nuke littered throughout the game which you can pick up for bonus experience.
Rogue City’s Intro
The game starts out with a cutscene in the form of Mediabreak news. Anchorman Casey Wong makes an appearance and brings up how there’s been a crime wave that resulted in the death of twenty one police officers.
This crime wave was caused by the local gangs looking to catch the attention of a dangerous “New Guy” that is seeking to do business in Old Detroit. A gang known as the Torch Heads would interrupt the broadcast after taking control of the Channel 9 Headquarters. With many hostages in danger, RoboCop is sent in to deal with the Torch Heads and save the civilians in trouble.
At this point, you’ll take control of RoboCop and explore around before entering the Channel 9 Headquarters. That aside, let’s go over the story as a whole.
Rogue City’s Overall Story Thoughts
The story of RoboCop: Rogue City is both predictable yet not at all at the same time. There are numerous occasions where I thought “I guess this is the end of the game”, only to have more content introduced. As one might imagine, Omni Consumer Products (henceforth referred to as OCP) is the root of many issues presented in the story. This is to be expected in any RoboCop story as OCP’s sheer amount of greed knows no limits.
One facet of the story that Rogue City does very well is Alex Murphy’s struggle with his identity. As the player, you’ll be able to make decisions whether RoboCop sees himself as Alex Murphy, a machine, or a mixture of both.
Being both man and machine, RoboCop’s human side fights back against the machine components that manifest themselves as visual and auditory hallucinations. One example is that RoboCop hallucinates a hostage as his former wife, Ellen Murphy.
The way these hallucinations manifest throughout the game can be both heart breaking and genuinely terrifying. As everything is in the first person and you can become immerse into playing the RoboCop character, you can get a feel for Alex Murphy’s struggle. Despite their best efforts, OCP has failed to extinguish Murphy’s soul.
Overall, the story is more of a “classic” RoboCop story that has predictable elements with dashes of humor and horror. If this was a movie instead, it would be a solid addition to the RoboCop franchise. As a game, Rogue City has its pros and cons with being put into the shoes of RoboCop.
First Impressions
When first taking control of RoboCop, one glaring thing that stuck out was some clipping with a police officer. As you can see in the image below, his arm is clipping through the gun’s magazine.
Moving around as RoboCop feels slow, though this is to be expected. You can’t jump, or crouch, and your sprint is more of a power walk. A good touch is that you can hear RoboCop’s footsteps throughout the game. That’s several hundred pounds of justice you hear, but this can be toggled in the options if you find it too annoying.
The starting scenery sets a huge precedent for the rest of the game. Numerous NPCs doing their own thing and adding flavor to the environment, nice lighting effects, and other environmental details such as litter flying through the air.
One particular detail I enjoyed was a cat found on some scaffolding. It’s just sitting next to a paint can and as cats do, knocks it over the ledge. This adorable detail shows that the developers like to add small details here and there that a keen eye may catch.
Unfortunately, another flaw of the game rears its head soon after the glorious cat bit. This would be the stiff facial animations that will continue to be present throughout the game. Many characters have a preset look of “angry”, “worried”, “neutral”, and won’t veer far off from that preset.
There is more animation on RoboCop’s lips and other main characters that the secondary characters lack. This is a bit jarring as the NPCs can appear just as robotic as RoboCop due to their lack of expressions. I feel like some more work should have gone into facial expressions to provide better contrast between regular humans and RoboCop.
The real fun begins when you make your way into the lobby of the Channel 9 Headquarters where you’ll fight some Torch Heads. Armed with the iconic Auto 9 pistol, you take out the Torch Heads in all of its burst fire glory.
It’s a very satisfying feeling to use the Auto 9, it feels very much like the Battle Rifle from Halo 2. It’s precise, hits hard, and efficiently takes out enemies.
Your aim has a fun impact on your gameplay as you’ll be able to shoot off limbs in a rather gory manner. Heads, arms, legs, it can all come off. Though this seems to be down to random chance at times as shooting limbs won’t always result in dismemberment. The gore and options to increase said gore in the game stays true to the RoboCop spirit.
You might be asking, “Can I shoot someone in the balls?”, and the answer to that is yes. In fact, it’s actually encouraged! Shooting someone in the crotch will result in a critical hit. NPCs shot this way will grab their crotch when this happens, it’s quite funny.
It’s a bit of a mixed bag to start but the gameplay more than makes up for it. You can tell passion and love went into this game, though it’s likely that budget was a limiting factor for the developers. All this game needs is a little polish here and there and it would be vastly improved, though let’s talk about the gameplay as that’s one aspect many people will be curious about.
Combat Gameplay
RoboCop: Rogue City is a First Person Shooter that takes an unconventional approach to the genre. You are slow, very slow. With the lack of a jump, crouch, or fast sprint, many FPS fans may feel limited by this approach. Your lack of mobility is made up for by being a walking tank that can take numerous bullets before being defeated.
Getting cover can be a tricky thing as you’ll need taller, more vertical objects to act as cover since you cannot crouch. If you lack cover, you can make your own cover by grabbing objects in the environment. Grabbing a dumpster will act as a shield for you until you throw it at some enemies. Unfortunately, you cannot use enemies as human shields or even place them down gently for that matter.
If you’re low on health, you’ll need to use an OCP Recovery Charge. This will heal you for 60% of your health (assuming you have no health upgrades) and you can carry up to three of them to start.
In true RoboCop fashion, you’ll be able to highlight multiple enemies by holding down the right mouse button. While in this mode, the screen will appear in an interlaced format with any previously marked enemies being highlighted. This is useful for hitting enemies obscured by fire, smoke, or other environmental factors.
Shot placement is important as some enemies will be armored. Repeated shots in heavily armored areas can prove useless, so you’ll need to aim for unarmored areas such as the limbs and joints. Along with that, any grenades thrown by enemies can be shot down mid-air.
With the right skills, you can gain new ways to fight such as the Ricochet ability. This is a very useful ability when enemies are behind cover. If you have this ability, you can look for green squares that will ricochet your bullets towards nearby enemies.
Though this is one skill of many that you can invest into to upgrade your combat abilities. There are many combat skills to suit different styles of play.
Skills and Upgrades
RoboCop: Rogue City offers simple ability skill upgrades that can change your gameplay. No matter which of these skills you upgrade, they will have an impact on your gameplay. This can affect your active combat gameplay or grant unique options during dialogue scenes.
You unlock a skill point for every 1,000 XP you get. You’ll gain XP by defeating enemies in combat, doing Secondary Missions, and picking up Notes and Collectibles hidden throughout the environment. If you’re very thorough, you’ll find OCP skill disk that instantly grants one skill point.
There are a total of eight skills you can choose to upgrade, each with three milestones that grant unique effects. Assuming you fully explore the game and do as many sidequests as possible, you’ll end up with around four to five filled skill trees by the end of the game. The skills are as follows:
Combat
This skill can grant you a shockwave to stun or defeat nearby enemies and instantly reload all weapons by punching someone. Investing in combat increases your weapon damage, so you can’t go wrong with this one.
Armor
The first milestone grants a shield ability that reduces damage by 80% for a few seconds when activated. You can reduce your damage from explosions and high caliber damage, but the final milestone is fun as small caliber rounds can ricochet off your armor and to nearby enemies. When you add points to Armor, you’ll gain increased damage reduction which helps you feel even more unstoppable.
Vitality
With Vitality, you can use Fuse Boxes to restore hit points, increase the amount of OCP Recovery Charges, and gain passive health regeneration. You’ll gain increased hit points when you invest in vitality.
Engineering
If you’re feeling too slow, engineering is a good option to choose. Engineering can unlock a dash that allows you to ram into enemies or quickly run to cover. Adding points to engineering is useful as it increases your chip modificator bonus. What that means will be explained in the “Mini-games” section.
The second milestone is useful for both combat and exploration purposes. With the second milestone, you’ll be able to crack safes without knowing the combination and reprogram enemy turrets to work for you.
Focus
If bullet time is your thing, you’ll want to choose focus. Focus grants the Slow Motion ability and increases critical hit damage. Investing into focus increases the duration of the slow motion skill, allowing you to more easily land headshots.
Scanning
Scanning will grant you the ability to ricochet bullets off certain walls, instantly mark enemies while using your zoom in feature, and extend your investigation vision range.
Deduction
Deduction will grant more experience gained, more easily detect useful information in the environment, and mark the location of valuable items or data on your map.
Weapons
Many of the weapons found in the game are rather lackluster. The Auto 9 pistol is the best weapon, hands down. It can be upgraded with various motherboards that change it to suit different combat styles ranging from semi-automatic, full auto, armor piercing, explosive rounds, spread shots, and more. Some upgrades even allow you to increase the gore when you take down an enemy with the Auto 9.
Enemies you defeat will drop numerous types of weapons from 9mm pistoles, Uzis, shotguns, assault rifles, and grenade launchers. Unfortunately your ammo for these weapons is extremely limited and they don’t feel worth picking up under most circumstances.
At least the game got the FN Minimi and SPAS-12 right, those weapons are always useful when you find them. The sniper rifle is useful where your Auto 9’s lack of long distance precision hinders you. While I won’t say where, the Cobra Assault Canon does make an appearance.
Breaching
A fun feature of RoboCop: Rogue City is the ability to breach doors or walls. Certain doors and structurally weak walls can be breached. RoboCop will punch open the door or wall and everything goes slow motion for a few seconds. This gives you a chance to pick off enemies before time flows normally.
Enemy AI
Early on the enemies are rather dumb, regardless of your difficulty settings. They’ll often just stand out in the open and maybe use cover. Though this is because you start out fighting street punks. As the game progresses, enemies you encounter will begin to utilize cover or unconventional tactics due to formal training or ruthlessness. The enemies could be a bit smarter to make gameplay more challenging overall though.
Exploration Gameplay
When you’re not in combat, you’ll be able to explore specific areas of Detroit. This is primarily Downtown Detroit with a few exceptions. You’ll be on the lookout for any stolen goods, Nuke, or any signs of trouble. You might need to investigate a murder, help an old woman find her cat, or issue tickets to people who have violated the law.
The scenery when you explore looks great, well… as great as this rendition of Detroit can look considering the abundance of crime and corruption going on. Many of the maps such as the Metro West Police Station had a lot of care put into their layouts.
They were made to be faithful recreations of the environment wherever possible, so you’ll be able to explore areas in the movies that you couldn’t fully see previously. Here are a few pictures of the environments, some of which you may recognize:
It’s safe to say that the secondary content is somewhat padded out due to how slowly you move. This slow movement is why so many of the exploration maps aren’t too big, so you won’t spend all day getting from point A to point B. The bulk of the stuff you’ll find are illegal or stolen goods that you can pick up, but there’s not much of a point to do that after you finished the “Pick up X amount of illegal goods” sub-objective.
If you’re looking to have a RoboCop movie experience, you might be better off sticking to the main objectives only. If you want to roleplay as Robocop, fully exploring the maps is not so much an issue but a roleplay feature. It’s not all guns and action, even the average citizen needs to be reminded to abide by the law.
While exploring, you’ll run into radios you can interact with. These are always a delight to use as they’ll typically play a funny ad related to this dystopian setting. This could be sleeping pills for overworked parents, hunting endangered animals in an enclosed safari, or shooting your remains into space with the option of family plans.
Music and Audio
The audio quality is all over the place in Rogue City. Where it matters it’s mostly well done but lacks in other areas.
Music
The music for RoboCop: Rogue City is lacking. While the original RoboCop theme that plays from time to time is always fantastic, there are only a few other songs added to the game. One of these is the same punk rock song that will be used in numerous parts of the game. After a while, that song gets a bit old.
The lack of ambient music may either add to or take away from the player’s experience. It was fairly common for older movies to have a lack of background music during the more quiet scenes. These days, ambient music or music for even mundane things in media is fairly common. Personally, I felt this game needed more music tracks and ambient music.
When the RoboCop theme hits hard during certain scenes, it hits HARD. It will fill you with the same thrill you had when you first watched RoboCop.
Voice Acting and Lip Synching
Much of the voice acting is a hit or miss. Peter Weller is good as expected, though other characters sound okay or really bad. Sergeant Reed’s lines sound particularly bad as his inflections and reactions to things don’t sound appropriate and hammy.
Lip-synching is a bit of an issue throughout this game. There were multiple occasions where someone spoke and their lips didn’t move. Other times, their lips would move but stop before their character’s audio track finished.
Audio Balancing
Audio balancing can be weird as it’s heavily dependent on the placement of the audio source. This is perfectly fine in normal gameplay, cutscenes… not so much. If a character is on the left side of the screen during a cutscene, their audio will lean more towards the left. If they’re farther off, they’ll be a bit harder to hear. This becomes a bigger issue when other noise sources such as radios, gunshots, and explosions drown out someone’s dialogue during a cutscene.
It might be best to keep subtitles on at all times just to make sure you don’t miss anything. More work could have put into this aspect of the game.
Sound Effects
The sound effects sound pretty good, especially with the Auto 9 pistol. Many of the weapons you pick up lack the OOMPH that the Auto 9 has. This in turn makes them feel less powerful than the Auto 9 which can make the player less likely to use them.
Overall Thoughts
This game has a good chunk of flaws, its gameplay is nothing revolutionary, the story is somewhat predictable, but it is a very fun game. It provides a great RoboCop experience between its over-the-top fights, quirky humor, jabs at late-stage capitalism, and numerous references to the films. It is a fantastic experience overall. The focus on Alex Murphy’s psychological state and PTSD is an excellent touch to the game.
Assuming you play thoroughly and do all side missions and explore around, you’ll probably complete the game between fifteen through eighteen hours. There is no New Game Plus unfortunately due to the highly linear nature of this game. If you’re new to the RoboCop franchise, you should watch RoboCop 1 and 2 before playing Rogue City.
You can tell a lot of love and passion went into the creation of this game. If budget wasn’t an issue, motion capture for more expressive characters would have helped immensely. The dev team was fairly small overall and they did a great job, it’s just that some things definitely could have been improved such as the audio and voice acting.
The DLC options are mostly cosmetic with the OCP Shotgun add-on only aiding you a little bit. The OCP Shotgun is useful in the early game against manned turrets and unarmored opponent, but its effectiveness falls off later in the game. With the DLCs, you’ll be able to don the blue and purple look from RoboCop 2 or a more damaged look.
If you’re a fan of RoboCop, you’ll definitely love this game as it has everything that made RoboCop great. Though if I had to sum up my overall thoughts on RoboCop: Rogue City, it would be:
