RoboCop: Rogue City review: a good RoboCop game, but a middling FPS

Stand RoboCop: Rogue City next to other FPS games in a police line-up, and you'll quickly notice the difference. This big guy is clunky, boxy, and has insane system requirements devoted to creating dazzling reflections. However, stand it next to other RoboCop games (maybe even the movies?) and it suddenly looks like a masterpiece in chrome. This is a filmic and faithful adaptation that's likely to get instant fan approval, but didn't leave my shooty thumbs that impressed.

The story begins with a classic hostage crisis (good reason to get you blasting slimebags early) and quickly becomes a tale about hunting down a perp related to a former antagonist. The heart of the tale, however, surrounds RoboCop's continuing devotion to his beat partner Anne Lewis, and two new friendships: a drug addict informant named Pickles (nice guy) and a therapist contracted to psychologically evaluate the robot policeman (nice lady).

"RoboCop goes to therapy" is, by itself, an excellent elevator pitch. But the ensuing bedlam lacks that laser focus and quickly becomes messy. The creators wring as much as they can out of the supporting cast, and there are some warm moments, choice-based consequences, and funny slice-of-life sidequests amid all the de-limbifying. At one point Robo tries to improve the wounded self-worth of his Nuke addict friend by going to the video rental store with him. It doesn't end well. But even with these character-building vignettes, I found it hard to invest in the emotions of a metal guy who is still used as a shorthand insult to mean someone who is wooden and straight-laced to the point of boredom. I'm being transparent here, RoboFans, I never really "got" RoboCop.

Still, a shooter is a shooter, so is it good at that? Well, again, how much do you like RoboCop? The sense of movement and weight feels exactly right for the slow marching, sharp turning mega-Roomba. The loyalty to that weight applies to the sprint button too, which simply triggers a kind of urgent walk. The enemy highlighting that occurs when looking down sights is spot-on, and it activates a sticky aim assist that is very helpful when you want to shoot dudes in the groin, and very unhelpful when you want to shoot red barrels next to those dudes' groins.

Later, as skills unlock, glowing panels will let you ricochet bullets to auto-dome guys hiding behind cover. And a dash manoeuvre gives you some much-needed speed. But early levels, before you've unlocked a good spread of these skills, feel full of missed opportunities. Safes you can't yet open, clues you can't yet scan, health-giving power outlets you can't plug into yet. This doesn't feel like the same deferred gratitude as, say, encountering a door to another area you're unable to enter yet. It just feels like a playground with half the slides roped off. That feeling alleviates after the first few hours, but it definitely sours the opening.

One big delight, I must concede, is the ever-present ability to grab any enemy and throw them, ragdolling and yelling, into their gunpals, or off ledges, or into exploding gas canisters, or simply at painful bits of the ceiling. Can't reach a perp to yeet? Pick up a TV or computer monitor or garbage container and simply hurl that at scum instead. It's a fun, action movie touch that encourages you to close the distance between yourself and your attackers. I think that is what the designers want - endless forward momentum. Enemies love to use grenades, and the best way to avoid those is to simply press on. Hostages will find themselves under fire, incentivizing you to be quick and thorough.

The problems come in moments of friction. The game seems to want you to fight steadily and urgently (large volume of enemies, the grenade spam, the pressure) but other features simulate Robo's clunkiness in a way that feels less intentional. You have to hover your view in a strict window over anything you want to interact with, and hold down buttons for a long time to pick up weapons. You can burst through walls... but you'll also get caught on upturned cardboard boxes.

This friction, along with a higher-than-average bugginess (special ability buttons stop working, machine guns fire endlessly without holding the trigger... there were more...) make the gunfights feel janky and rigid. Which, yes, is in keeping with the character you embody. But risks annoying folks who are used to slicker, more mobility-focused shootybangs. And what can I say? That's me.

And there's another casualty of RoboCop's shtompy shtick: the level design. Other shooters will have you weave into and out of cover, duck behind crates, leap gaps, climb walls, slide under closing garage doors. But, by design, none of that is in the RoboUserManual. RoboCop does not jump, he does not vault or mount or even crouch. RoboCop marches forward, inexorably, and he shoots his gun from the hip until no more slime remains.

Cool. But that means most levels become repetitive, boxy corridors, simply because nothing more is required. Even the waist-high cover, provided solely for your enemies, feels redundant. It's not that the environments don't look impressive - they do. The game captures "untidy America" very well. There are dank city streets full of laundromats, pawn shops, and busted-up shop fronts. The lighting in particular is often stunning. Bad guys are framed in gateways with bright cinematic beams around them. Grungy back alleys come alive with neon puddles. All this is what those ferocious system requirements are for, I'm guessing.

So it's not the look of Old Detroit that's off. It's the feel. The layout of the streets, industrial estates, and hospitals feel either uncanny or uninteresting. Robo's trudging saunter often makes the spaces feel too large, too open, even at his brisker "sprinting" pace. Again, the fidelity is sky high. Cars gleam, pipes rust and leak, toilets look suitably sullied, alleyway trash gets caught in windy eddies and whips into the air. But strip it all back and Detroit is a box full of other boxes. Sometimes that boxiness adds to the cramped reality of a setting, such as one neat prison level where a riot breaks out. But more often than not, levels become samey corridor-room-corridor haunted house rides. Nothing really stands out, you'll find no "weenies" here, save for one glowing gas station sign that reads "Hell".

Partly my negativity is a reflection of who this game was made for, ie. not me. Fans of the movies and those who get a laugh from the over-the-top gore of it will probably enjoy it. In many ways it is a story-driven, choice-making RoboGame more than it is a shooter. And the goofiness with which it embraces that is sometimes admirable. The game feels at a kind of stoner ease when it leans into dumbass action. I'm thinking of the enemy dialogue that falls heavily to the comedy side of the bark matrix. Trained guards shouting "hand compromised!" when their entire arm has been blown off is undeniably comical. Calmly stating "reporting lost leg" when a shotgun blast removes your lower limb is the act of a true stoic.

But the jank is hard to ignore, and the plain level design - a sad casualty of Robo's loyally limited movement - kills it for me. Fans of certain ex-Murphys will find much to like in the mess of Rogue City's perp-hurling, choice-making, and side-questing. But for me, the machine commits too many FPS crimes.

This review was based on a review build of the game provided by developers Nacon.