Play on: PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S
Current goal: Serve the public trust. Protect the innocent. Obey the law.
I didn’t find time for RoboCop: Rogue City when it came out last year, but I’ve only just started digging into it now, after recently buying it on sale, and I think it’s a pretty good example of the kind of game that rarely gets made, the kind that exists somewhere between the tight focus of low-budget indie games and the colossal territory of big-budget blockbusters. It’s a mainstream, mid-budget game that doesn’t try to pass itself off as anything else. It wears its looping, canned animations on its face, evidence that this is a game that couldn’t take the “no expense spared” approach, so as you walk around its surroundings, you can sometimes feel like you’re playing a PS3 game, albeit in a way that I found endearing rather than off-putting. Instead, the people who made it spent their time and money on the things that mattered most, like making sure you play as RoboCop I feel true, powerful and expressive, the violence is spectacularly over the top, and the world exudes the atmosphere of grimy urban decay that permeates the Detroit of Paul Verhoeven’s original film.
I was also pleasantly surprised by how much time you spend doing something other than shooting punks. There are mini-sections of the open world where you do real police work—looking for clues, interrogating people, tracking down suspects—and at least at first, it seems like the ongoing theme of Murphy’s continued humanity (and how, to the corporate morons at OCP, humanity is nothing more than a problem to be solved) could be addressed in an engaging way. I hope I get to take on a few of those corporate morons before it’s all said and done. I wouldn’t feel like RoboCop history without it.—Carolyn Petit
