RoboCop: Rogue City Review

Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop was the film in my school that everyone under the age of eighteen wanted to watch but wasn’t allowed to. Fortunately for my friend and I, we managed to sneakily watch his Dad copy on VHS. As a naïve tweenager I was blown away by what I saw. The hyper-violence, the dark satire, and the coolest hero I’d ever laid eyes on; Robocop proved an explosive experience that only led to a handful of sleepless nights due to nightmares about melting faces. Since his iconic debut though, times have been hard for the cyborg cop. A series of lacklustre film sequels and an awful modern remake have all helped dull Robocop’s once-shiny armour. Step in RoboCop: Rogue City, the first video game starring the titular hero in years. Has developer Teyon’s latest FPS got what it takes to restore the RoboCop legacy? Well, unfortunately, no.

Set between RoboCop 2 and 3, what Rogue City gets absolutely right is its visual and aesthetic representation of Detroit City and its notorious inhabitants. This game looks like it stepped straight out of the late 1980’s, and I mean that in a good way. Buildings are blocky grey concrete monstrosities bathed in mist, office workers wear ill-fitting suits with enormous shoulder pads, and every punk about to be blown away looks like an extra from Mad Max. In this retro-futuristic world, cassette tapes and computer monitors the size of a small county are the height of smart technology.

RoboCop himself is also captured perfectly, thanks in part to the standout performance of returning original actor Peter Weller. The opening level, which sees RoboCop clear out a punk-infested TV station, is like a nostalgia punch right to the cerebellum. Those clunking footsteps, the thrilling musical score, and that distinctive neon-green tinted visor targeting system; well, they all deserve a chef’s kiss. In fact, the opening level of Rogue City is the highlight of the game. It’s an interactive and glorious retelling of RoboCop’s violent gang take-down in the 1987 original. It left me grinning from ear to ear.

Sadly, what followed resulted only in frowning and an occasional howl of despair. Things start off well enough in the central hub of the police station. Along with some tutorials, RoboCop can chat with his fellow officers, including pitch-perfect characterisations of Anne Lewis and Sgt Reed. From there you’ll set off to your first open area of the game, some moody grey-looking slums.

In this region, RoboCop can pick up side missions and also follow the main quest. There’s things like handing out parking tickets, some basic detective work to be done – solving crimes is apparently as simple as scanning four or five objects and following a track of luminous footprints it seems – and then there are gang-controlled buildings to clear out. These involve stomping down drab corridors and discovering a never-ending series of store rooms to poke your head in and see if there are any med-kits or stolen purses to recover. Oh, and you’ll encounter an army of very stupid punks to shoot at.

I say very stupid, but that really doesn’t do the AI in this game justice. Standing very still and shooting is the punk’s approach to all things in life. They’ll continue to do this even if they’ve just been shot. In the chest. They also like to crouch behind cover but remain in plain sight of RoboCop anyway. They also enjoy throwing grenades that will accidentally kill all their friends. Heck, later in the game, in some of the more open-plan environments, the AI gets even dumber, failing to follow RoboCop due to encountering heavy resistance from a flight of stairs, or riding their motorbikes like they are on train tracks. Just find a good place to stand and the idiots will keep on looping back into your line of sight. It all serves to make the gunplay incredibly repetitive and unengaging, a matter not helped by the fact that RoboCop is actually a rubbish video game protagonist.

I know, I feel bad even thinking that, but after the initial thrill of being an unstoppable killing machine comes the realisation that it’s actually quite boring being an unstoppable killing machine. RoboCop is a human tank, meaning his level of manoeuvrability is limited to walking and standing. Couple this with the enemy’s unquenchable desire to get shot, and this leads to dreary combat encounters. When the standard Auto 9 is so overpowered, there’s little point exploring further tactical options. You can unlock more skills, but from an incredibly unwieldy and nausea-inducing dash, to a temporary shield, and an overdone slow-mo focus mode, they add little to proceedings. Stand still, shoot, find some more medkits, and repeat all over again is the name of the game from beginning to end.

Past the enjoyable 1980s-infused visuals and setting that’s authentic to the films, there’s little imagination to be found in RoboCop: Rogue City. The searing social commentary of the original film is absent, and taking its place are some of the most outrageously boring fetch quests imaginable. At one point, RoboCop was sent to fetch a towel for a fellow officer who was in the shower – I kid you not. One of Robocop’s prime directives may well be to serve the public trust, but towel fetching is going a bit too far. Complete those fetch quests and there’s a bit more crime-solving to be done – just scan those four clues, people! – and further wandering around vast empty levels blasting never-ending hordes of punks. In fact, it was during one such interminable mission taking place in a construction site that it struck me what RoboCop: Rogue City reminded me of: a slightly naff PS3-era FPS.

A decent story with some intriguing narrative beats almost holds everything together, and for RoboCop purists that might be enough, as long as those same cyborg-police-loving aficionados are willing to put up with a litany of bugs, glitches, and frame rate issues. Cut scenes regularly flicker as if an Agent had just turned up in the Matrix, whilst voice over volume levels are all over the place. Explosions often fail to kill your enemies, and those same enemies, when flung, will hilariously disappear through the walls and floor into some sort of digital oblivion. Then there is the frame rate – often smartly disguised by the fact RoboCop moves so slowly – which can stutter into a stodgy mess. The Robocop license deserves better justice than this.