RoboCop: Rogue City PS5 Review 8/10 "Oh, how I miss squibs!" 🤖 @TeyonGames #IndieGame #GameDev

Oh, how I miss squibs. These days action movies simulate blood splatter from gunshots with CGI and, while now relatively convincing, it just doesn’t have the same visceral impact as detonating a small bag of fake blood. 

RoboCop: Rogue City developer Teyon clearly feels the same way. This is a game almost entirely about blasting sneering criminals with high-powered weaponry and every thumping shot sends beautiful fountains of the red stuff spiralling through the air and onto the scenery. If this somehow isn’t enough, the game offers a “More Gore” weapon upgrade to truly paint the town red. Paul Verhoeven would be proud.

But, if imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery, he should be. The developers have pored over every molecule of RoboCop (and also its lesser-quality sequels) to synthesise this game. 

Peter Weller is back to deliver the faintly sardonic metallic monotone that adds so much character to RoboCop, facial likenesses of supporting actors Nancy Allen, Robert DoQui, and Dan O’Herligy, and makes it full use of Basil Poledouris’ score.

Crucial though all that stuff is to deliver an accurate RoboCop experience, the real meat comes in the way the game understands and expands the movie’s philosophical ponderings. At a brief n’ breezy 102 minutes the 1987 movie is a masterclass in concise storytelling, but even within that Verhoeven finds time to dig into what “half man, half machine, all cop” actually means.

A 10-hour video game gives those themes room to exhale. The game’s surface plot is, to be bluntly honest, RoboCop-by-numbers: corrupt 1980s stereotypes want to replace RoboCop and the police with crappy robots to make money: “Who cares if they work?!”. But, simmering away under this is RoboCop pondering his existence: is he a corpse in an armoured shell? An increasingly obsolete corporate product? A beat cop with a big gun? Or just plain old Alex Murphy saddled with a strange disability?

The best part is, you get to decide. Throughout the game, you’re encouraged to choose between upholding the law or serving the public trust (i.e. being a sticker for the rules or giving minor offenders the benefit of the doubt). You’re also placed in an ongoing ethical quandary around an investigative journalist who’s breaking the law for the greater good and deal with being pulled between two candidates in the upcoming mayoral elections. It’s a credit to Teyon’s writers that, no matter how you shape “your” RoboCop’s personality, he’s still recognisably RoboCop.

All that said, the interesting philosophy stuff is the gooey cheese on top of a toast composed of deafening gunfire and screaming punks with disintegrated balls. The vast majority of Rogue City sees you lumbering around various environments as hapless enemies ping bullets off your armour and you turn them to pink mist with your mighty Auto-9 hand cannon. If you’re feeling uncharitable it’s baby’s first-person shooter, a relentless and largely mindless blastathon. Taken in the context of the franchise? This conveyor belt of brutality is a perfect fit.

Frankly, it’s something of a novelty to play a shooter in which you play a highly armoured and basically invincible tank slowly stomping toward enemies that are no real threat to you. As the game begins RoboCop is already an absurdly durable protagonist, but by the halfway point you’ll probably have regenerating shields, boosted health, and recharging health by grabbing exposed wiring.

Your lethality also satisfyingly skyrockets early on. You can use weapons other than your trust Auto-9, but why would you? A third of the way into the game I’d upgraded it so it didn’t need to reload and was fully automatic, meaning holding down the trigger produced a soundbar-troubling infinite volley of bullets towards whatever hapless biker decided to square up to this trundling metal avatar of death. If Rogue City were any longer this gameplay would become stale. But, at around ten hours, the credits roll at precisely the same time as the combat gets old.

That’s also bolstered by some amazing Unreal Engine 5 visuals, which distil the specific grody urban nightmare of the original movie. It takes serious talent to make a city this unappealing and grim and, in just the right light and composition, there are moments in Rogue City that approach photorealism.

I say “moments” because while Old Detroit is a stunning environment, its inhabitants are less than convincing. I guess the limited budget had to hit somewhere, and the NPC animation makes the city look like it’s populated by malfunctioning animatronic puppets. RoboCop himself is well-animated (well, he would be) but seeing other characters herkily jerk through cutscenes like their head is only vaguely attached to their body makes you wonder if OCP’s plan to replace the cops with robots has started early.

It’s particularly odd as animation elsewhere is excellent, particularly the way ED-209 and other mechanical enemies mimic stop-motion animation. If Teyon made a lot of money out of this game (and I hope they did) then investing it in a motion capture studio should be a no-brainer. 

A little more annoying is an omnipresent bug in which every camera cut between two characters results in an almost subliminal broken frame in which their model is only half-drawn. I reviewed the PlayStation 5 version so perhaps this isn’t the case on Xbox and PC, but this small bug goes a long way toward sanding off the polish on the game.

SUMMARY

It’s a testament to how good the rest of Rogue City is that these objective flaws are easy to forgive. Budget and time constraints might mean that RoboCop: Rogue City isn’t a perfect RoboCop game, but it’s damn close and bottles the spirit of the franchise in a way vanishingly few licensed adaptations ever manage. And yes, I would buy that for a dollar.