Robocop: Rogue City is a FPS action game was released in 2023 for PS5, XSX/S, and PC. It was developed by Teyon and published by Nacon.
I really loved watching multiple of classic action films that really defines the 80s generation era. It became really the main thing in the 80s when delivering several of recognisable action films such as Rambo First Blood, Commando, The Terminator, Die Hard, Predator, Aliens, Lethal Weapons, and Mad Max 2, so those were the golden age of 80's action flick movies that involves shooting, blasting, and blowing the shit of those guys in pieces is what we loved about these kinds of films that we had to adore the awesomeness.
There's one of the film that caught my attention was the Robocop, an 1987's cyberpunk action film was directed by Paul Verhoeven.
It stars Peter Weller taking an role of police officer named Alex Murphy who fatally been blown-off in pieces by gang of criminals in the first scene and then he been rushed to the megacorperation to resurrect him as the cyborg law enforcer and named him Robocop.
As he unware of his former life, he then proceeds his mission to shoot down the group of bad guys is what the whole action has just begun.
It was best known for its over-the-top action sequences with tons of gorefest shooting spree is looking incredible to watch seeing a cyber-police just shooting the f**k out of gangs is what made me watch the movie, and of course I got to praise the other things such as Sci-Fi presentation settings, the story is quite well-written for action genre, and of course you can't go wrong with Robocop as the badass cop hero with metallic-suits is what made the original film a financial success upon the release in 1987 earning $53.4 million, and it has been hailed as one of the best films of the 1980s and listed as one of the greatest Sci-Fi action films ever made.
The success of the original film has spawned films sequel such as Robocop 2 was released in 1990 which made an moderate box office success but not quite well-received as the original but also a decent film in my opinion, until when Robocop 3 was released in 1993 it was critical and commercial flop making it the worst of the film trilogy.
It also created numerous of other medias such as animated series, live-action TV shows, comic book, toys and merchandise, and of course the multiples of Robocop's video games.
To be honest, I never actually played three of these film based Robocop games such as 1,2, and 3, but there's one of the game outside of the film series has to be Robocop vs Terminator for SEGA Genesis/MD developed by Virgin Games, which is an ultra-violent Run n Gun shooter that I actually enjoyed playing on the 16-bit machine.
In later years, the 2003's Robocop game was released for PS2, Xbox, Gamecube, and PC was developed by Titus Interactive, yeah its one of a shitty team that created Superman 64 which is an obvious being the worst N64 game of all-time, so they managed to f**k up the license video games again with the Robocop 2003 which thank god I avoided the game after hearing the negative response from the media.
Going forward to year 2021, Robocop: Rogue City was announced with the teaser trailer and the first gameplay trailer was unveiled a year later which I am hoping to see a good Robocop game, but there's a catch that got me bit concerned at the start before the game's release.
You might or not know the developer team like Teyon was responsible with their terrible previous effort on movie license games such as Rambo: The Video Game was notoriously being panned at release in 2014 and then they did with the Terminator: Resistance in 2019 which is an mediocre FPS game with no redeeming quality whatsoever.
This got me really concerning to see another film license game are going to get tarnished by the same developer team before the game gets the release in 2023, but after the game has released at launch date I've began to discover the Metacritic website to see the game's overall score and WOW! I did not expect the game had gained such an praise by critics and users which turns out to be better than we're expected.
Having to see the game's decent score is what made me got curious to try the game out for the PS5, so I'd buy that for a dollar! that's right everyone, just bought the PS5 copy off from Ebay online store.
Is the Robocop: Rogue City any good to play or is it just a plain waste of time? I'll be covering this game to deliver the pros and cons that doing the film license title a justice.
So without go further do, let's start the review.
Presentation
The game is set between the films such as Robocop 2 and 3, and its depicts a dystopian near-future Detroit where the whole city and streets been impoverished and overrun with criminal activity.
After the following event of Robocop 2, you take the role of cyber-police enforcer named Robocop has an duty is to uphold the law and serve the public trust, as you on the mission to confront and shoot down the new group of street-gangs, led by the leader known as The New Guy, are plotting to take over the city and creating their new waves of crime.
I know the whole story in the game is kinda sounds too basic for you guys, but to be fair it's quite acceptable because it's f***ing Robocop everyone, we all had to agree with it is what I've loved about the whole franchise.
You just go out shooting or confronting the gangs and their leader, give arrest or warning to vandals, and of course saving and protecting the innocent lives of people in the city.
If you want to know the game's backstory on Robocop's origin then I highly recommend you to watch the films such as Robocop 1 and 2 to know what was going on before you can proceed to this story campaign.
I got to say I really liked Robocop as a major protagonist because I find his sliver metallic-suit and helmet looked really badass especially in 80s films, he goes out and shoot many of bad guys down with his automatic pistol weapon is just f***ing cool.
He also has likable catchphrase "Dead or Alive, You're coming with me!", "You're under the arrest", "Serve the public trust, Protect the innocent, Uphold the law", and "Thank you for your Cooperation".
He also had a sidekick like Anne Lewis, a female police officer you may know from the Robocop films are also featured in the game.
The game also introduces some of supportive characters like Ulysses Washington who joins the DPD as a new police officer and becoming Robocop's trainee (mostly on side-quest missions). Then you have a therapist Dr. Olivia Blanche who is called in by OCP to discuss Robocop's mental and emotional state at the behest of the Old Man.
A street informant like Pickles who assist Robocop with various street-level investigations, and of course the female news reporter such as Samantha Ortiz who seeks her revenge on OCP after her mother was disgraced by the company.
There's one of the character that I can't f***ing stand is Max Becker who was CEO of OCP's security concepts division is nothing but an arrogant asshole with his shit-talking attitude just feels like you wanted to punch his f***ing face to make him shut the f**k up.
The game's main villain such as The New Guy who is a new crime boss in Detroit bears a striking resemblance to Hans Gruber from Die Hard.
He is a one smug bastard has his dirty plans by offering money to any gang willing to accept his proposal to take the city down.
The presentation settings in this game is excellent because I really liked the 80s Sci-fi aesthetics of the game's design is quite identical to the film franchise.
You have the police station which has briefing room, offices, changing room, parking area, and of course the shooting gallery training.
The Steel Mill was an steelmaking facility being abandoned filled with rusting places but many areas were still live with power and lights, heavy machinery was still on power and hazardous materials had simply been left in situ.
The city streets has road, bridges, video rental shop, arcade club, apartments, laundry facility, movie theatre, garage, and courtroom house.
The OCP headquarter is ridiculously tall and big as soon you entered the building, you'll see the wide-open reception area at the ground floor, then you will see many rooms in some floors like the admin room, office room, conference room, and meeting room, then you'll go into the elevator which you'll be feel incredible to see a outside view when being inside the elevator goes all the way up to top floor.
Overall, it has basic but fine story, recognisable protagonist, and excellent presentation settings.
Gameplay
In single-player campaign, you take control of Robocop in 1st-person perspective as your goal is to complete the list of objectives on both main and side missions, so your duty is to serve the public trust, protect the innocent, and uphold the law.
Pushing the left-stick controls is to move and the right-stick to aim and look around, then you can able to sprint by pressing the left thumbstick button to make you run faster, and you can pick up objects or interact stuff by pressing the square button.
For combat, press the right trigger button to fire your weapons at enemies or objects, while holding down the left trigger button which allowing you to aim at your enemies highlighting with targeting scan mode, and you can attack them with melee by pressing the right shoulder button as well as grabbing and throw them in close combat range or pick up and throw heavy objects at the enemies with the square button.
You can activate your night-vision with the right thumbstick button which allowing you to see things in the dark areas.
While taking damage from the enemies that could lead you to the low health, you can heal yourself by holding the circle button to increase your health points, so be sure to grab the health pack to use it.
While obtaining the abilities, you can able to temporarily slowdown time by pressing the left shoulder button which allowing you to shoot down enemies faster, and you can temporarily activate the shield by pressing the circle button which protects you from enemy's projectiles, and of course you can able to dash forward by pressing the cross button.
You can also change the firing mode by pressing the d-pad up button which switches from burst to rapid fire options.
You can perform the shockwaves by pressing the d-pad down button which stuns the enemies or electrocute the turrets.
So far, the controls plays good for most part is because unlike any of traditional FPS game which are more focused on fast-paced combat, this title is more of heavy and slow approach which I really liked the direction of this game feels more like you're Robocop walking through the area and gun down the enemies just works nicely in the game.
The control layout in this game is pretty good which I can able to select any of 3 presets settings and sensitivity options, but I wish the melee and night-vision button could have swapped places, so as I being said it plays fine.
Aside with the controls, I wanted to talk about the whole gameplay design which is a important part of the game because this game plays on the open-world FPS perspective similar to games like Deus Ex where not only you had a list of main and side mission objectives to complete the task, but you may also want to focus on upgrading your abilities and skill enhancements to improve your attributes such as your vitality which expands your health bar, focus that increases how long slow motion lasts, armor that reduces taking damage, engineering that grants bonuses to skill enhancements, combat that increases your damage shot, and of course the deduction that gain more experience points from notes.
Each of these will have 3 perks because the more you add-up to your upgrade abilities the improvement you will obtain with the perks such as your health will automatically recharges, doubles the critical damage, heavy weapons damage reduced by 25%, unlocking safes and reprogram turrets, using shockwave kills nearby enemies, and revealing more information on map.
You will also have auto-9 pistol's upgrade system which allowing you to modify and enhance your main weapon such as your magazine capacity which increases your ammunition, weapons spread is used to emulate stability of your aim, reload speed which allowing you to reload your weapon faster, weapon damage is making your weapon stronger to shoot down enemies with heavy damage shot, and armor piecing that can damage your enemy's strong and tough armors.
I say these upgradable system is not really a bad thing for this title which I did appreciate their effort to add things in the game, so while the ability and weapon upgrade works fine for most part I had to point out one of the thing that kinda became unnecessary is the stupid penalty system on the auto-9 pistol's modification that decreases your enhanced weapon's strength just kinda ruins the fun part of the game, so you had to keep changing the modification to stop decreasing your weapon's attributes is sometime can be real pain in the ass.
What I've liked about the game is that you have a dialogue tree during the conversation with NPCs, so what it does is that it gives you an choice to choose any of these dialogues of what to say and makes subsequent choices until the conversation ends.
For example: if you encountered any of NPCs that committed crime like vandalism or burglary you have an option to give them warning if they wiling not to do it again or charge them with the price as their punishment.
Other example can be political stuff like they want you to give an opinion on mayor's party movement and which ones you take sides may reflect on game's outcome, so these dialogue system are actually well made that gives you a choice of making decision.
I say the combat system is somewhat fun to play, so you have a auto-9 pistol which is a Robocop's iconic weapon that allow you to switch the gun modes such as the burst fire that can shoot 3 rounds makes it an easier to target and fire the enemies where as the full-auto fire which allowing you to rapidly fire but makes the targeting accuracy bit difficult to shoot, so I really liked the pistol which works mostly well during the combat.
You can also pick-up enemy's weapons like shotgun are used for close range combat deals heavy damage shot, the assault rifle works better for long-distance range shot deals mild damage shot, grenade launcher deals a heavy explosion damage works effectively on heavy-duty enemies, and the sniper-rifle is a long-distance ranged weapon that not only you can toggle the zoom-in but also works well for instant headshot kills.
My favourite part for the combat is that you can throw heavy objects like motorcycle and gas tank at the enemies or grab and throw them onto walls or grounds is quite fun to do because there's not any of modern FPS games had done it before, so I can give this game a credit for giving the players ability to throw heavy random stuff at them or you just instantly grab them and chuck it onto wall and ground is fun addition to combat gameplay.
I got to say the gore system is wild in this game because you can blow off the enemy's limbs off like arms, legs, head, and even with balls are pretty gruesome like you see from the first Robocop film, so I really liked the type of shooters like Soldier of Fortune and Cold Winter which is notoriously violent FPS game that I really liked kinds of stuff that may appeal to those who really into with the ultra graphic content, so they did a Robocop game quite right which I am happy it turned out to be quite success.
I wanted to praise the scan mode which are used for various stuffs like follow the blood trails, collecting ID infos, obtaining the locations, and gathering the evidence like the bullet-holes on the wall and the wounds of the dead bodies that became part of the investigation segments, so scanning around the rooms is not really difficult to spot on just feels really smooth and easier to obtain.
I do enjoy exploring around the open-world areas which allows me to browse through streets where you get to talk with the NPCs, so if you can accept their request then you'll begin with the side-quests which is an outside of the main story mission but completing the side-quests will reward you with extra experience points which is really good thing to do something different from the main story mission like helping Pickles return a watch to the rightful owner, destroying a stash of drugs in Steel Mills, rescuing hostages and shoot down offenders in courthouse, uncovering the mysteries of female worker's death, and of course helping the reporter who works for Channel 9 news, so these side-quests is done something right that keeps you busy with the game.
Of course the main story mission is pretty decent too which you will have several of amazing segments like investigating the crime scene, confronting the drug leader, face to face with unstoppable bosses like ED-209, disarming the bomb, and of course so many shooting action that never gets old is what makes Robocop: Rogue City a fun to play.
Overall, it has good control, fun combat, and decent single-player missions.
Graphics
I say graphics is actually not a bad effort which they utilizes the game with the Unreal engine 5 showcasing the 9th-gen console hardware aspect.
The open-world environmental is quite decent in some places, but I wouldn't consider calling it big because the city street is the major focus of location to fit-in the film series presentation settings.
I like how they designed the streets in terms of sizes to make it look like it's good enough to explore around looks pretty straightforward.
I also liked some other locations such as steel mill and OCP's headquarters which had a great amount of open areas in terms of sizes, where as other places like police station and hospital are usually smaller which they did a good job of keep the game design précised and consistent.
I want to praise the use of the textures and surfaces looked really razor sharp in details for walls, roads, grounds, and objects just looked quite amazing in many areas, and I also liked the real-time lighting and shadow effects are also did a fine job for its reflection level starting from fade to glow just works nicely in the game.
There are some faults in some areas is that you may encounter with the shimmering effect which it might have been a bug or something that needs to be addressed, but it didn't actually harm the whole game to be honest with you guys because it may or may not happen occasionally sometimes.
The best part of the game is got to be a destructible and particles effects because when you fire the weapon at the wall or surfaces you may see decent amount of damaged stuffs like bullet holes on the walls, cracked walls falling into pieces, the objects went shattered all over the places like glass and papers, and computers went explode.
The character's animation is acceptable for the body figure and facial design is looking fine, but I find the lip-syncing is kinda bit stiff during the dialogue cutscene.
The gore effects that I've mentioned before is still insane as you can see their body parts gets exploded with the bullets that made the enemy's body parts spilled over the blood on the ground and their remaining limbs are scattered around all-over the places are just pretty brutal to see, but I f***ing love it.
I also wanted to talk about the game's performance because this game has different advantages in each system, so you have two graphical options such as quality and performance mode.
The quality mode targets with locked 30fps where as the performance mode just runs on 60fps, so both of these system can run up to 1440p resolution, but to be frankly honest the visual design makes no difference on those two graphical options in which you still retain the same textures, lighting, and animation details on both of those modes.
What makes it difference is that we had to keep an close eye on the frame-rate level because it perform decently on performance mode which had a little bit of frame dips between 50-60fps which doesn't seem to hurt the game's performance as the quality mode which unfortunately it went sluggish from 20-30fps doesn't feel as optimised to play, so I highly recommended to play it on the performance mode instead.
Be warned about playing on the Series S model which seems to be really missing out the amount of graphical details doesn't quite look as nice in comparison with the Series X model and PS5 version looks better and way detailed.
Overall, it has decent open-world environments, razor sharp details, wild gore effects, and acceptable performance.
Music and Sounds
The soundtrack in this game is very good especially with the original theme song from the movie, was originally composed by Basil Poledouris, just feels like you're pumping up for shooting action.
I also wanted to praise the whole soundtrack in the game which was composed by Draco Nared and Chris Detyna did a excellent job of creating an epic orchestral action for most part and of course it has two of a cool 80s-style rock music like "Ugly Side" and "NUKE" is quite enjoyable to listen.
The sound design in this game is quite good for its environmental side such as explosion effects, destructible noises, and of course gun-shooting sounds is just right for this type of action game.
I say Peter Weller did a great job for his voice role of titular character which makes Robocop the most recognisable film heroes of 80's action film.
Overall, it has very good soundtrack, good sound design, and great voice performance.
Special Features
This game comes with DLC standalone title called Unfinished Business which set to be released around in Q3 2025 seems to be a great addition to this game.
The game also has new game plus which you will begin the game again while retaining all your obtained upgrades that you had it from the first playthroughs.
Overall, a fine content.
Advantages
Great presentation settings
Solid single-player campaign
Fun combat and action-packed gameplay
Decent visual design
Very good soundtrack and sound design
Great voice performance by Peter Weller
Disadvantages
Auto-9 Pistol's penalty system.
Frame-dips and Shimmering effects on visual side.
Stiff lip-syncing during cutscenes.
Series S model didn't look good as the Series X model for graphical details.
Final Verdicts
Presentation 8/10 - basic but fine story, recognisable protagonist, and excellent presentation settings.
Gameplay 7.5/10 - good control, fun combat, and decent single-player missions.
Graphics 7.5/10 - decent open-world environments, razor sharp details, wild gore effects, and acceptable performance.
Music and Sounds 8/10 - very good soundtrack, good sound design, and great voice performance.
Special Features - 7/10 - Has DLCs standalone title and new game plus.
Overall 7.5/10 - Robocop: Rogue City is a surprisingly good FPS that Teyon just finally got the game right making it a better title than their previous effort on two licensed-film games from the past, and it is also a better Robocop 3 that we never actually got.
I am glad that it turned out to be a fine licensed-film game that is not totally disaster because they putting lot of their effort on this work to get this game being faithful to the franchise's source material, so you have a presentation settings that came close to the original film, the storyline has to be just as good as the film, you have a iconic cyber-cop voiced by an original actor, and of course the epic action-packed shooter with fun combat and decent single-player campaign is what makes the game done so right.
The physical copy for both PS5 and XSX/S cost between £20 and £25 seems to be a fine purchase, where as the digital copy from the storefront such as PS Store, Xbox Store, and Steam cost about £45 and £50 for standard edition, as well as the Alex Murphy Bundle Edition cost between £50 and £60.
Is the game worth playing? I say if I were you as a fan of the film series then I'd buy that for a dollar because Robocop: Rogue City is the Robocop game that we all deserve such a decent FPS shooting action.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Skip it
Rent it
Buy it
If you like my recent blog, please hit like and comment below for further questions.
This is Zeeshan Mirza's Blog and I'll see you next time, happy blogging everyone.