Crime Boss: Rockay City, a game announced last year with a trailer that seemed like the worldâs most ill-timed April Foolâs Joke (it was December), is out! You may not know this, though, because nobody is talking about it.
If a game is good, people will talk about it. If a game is bad, people will also talk about it. If a game is bad in ways that also make it interesting, it gets talked about, and if a game is bad in ways that are incredibly funny then, once again, it gets talked about. Maybe itâs a 1000-word impressions piece on Kotaku.com, maybe itâs a bunch of tweets, maybe itâs a video series about bloopers and mishaps, these are all ways youâor someone, anyoneâcan talk about a video game.
This is important, because talking about a video game is the only way we, as a culture, keep a game alive. I donât want to get too into it on this postâwhich does not have the bandwidth for itâbut discs on a shelf are just hunks of plastic, and code on a HDD just 1s and 0s, lying around. Itâs us experiencing them, building memories/opinions on them then sharing those with other people, that make video games what they are. What is all this, what Iâm writing, what youâre reading, the communities you form and are a part of, if not just one big way for us to share our thoughts on video games?
Anyway, what Iâm getting at here is that thereâs space and scope to talk about almost every video game on the planet, love them or hate them. Except Crime Boss: Rockay City. Which nobody (except me, here, under great distress) is talking about, even though itâs been out for almost a month now. And now I know why.
I have âplayedâ this, in so much as you can subject yourself to sitting down and experiencing this game. And have found myself unable to review it, or even give my impressions on it, in the standard âhey check this outâ kinda way. I was so repulsed by its packaging, so in awe at the way it gets absolutely everything it sets out to do wrong that I feel like I have to write this and publish it on the site just so someone else can reassure me that any of this actually happened.
Rockay City is a fever dream. Itâs the outline of a video game, coloured in by tortured ghosts from the 80s and 90s. Itâs like a scammy powerpoint presentation for a blockchain game, only with sections containing actual gameplay. Here is the gameâs launch trailerâitâs out, you can buy it, and even play itâto show Iâm not making any of this up:
Michael Madsen carried the burdens of 1000 lifetimes into the recording studio for this, and none of them turned in a good performance. Serial asshole Chuck Norris is so lifeless that an 80âs text-to-speech system could have done a better job delivering his lines. Kim Basinger and Danny Gloverâs agents should be fired into the sun for this. And Vanilla IceâŚwell, Vanilla Ice is actually great here, I have nothing bad to say about Vanilla Ice.
Thereâs writing in Rockay City in the most qualifying sense, in that there are words in the English language that come after other words, but whether these form complete and coherent sentences is up for debate. There is also a plot, in the same way the key art and promo tweet for a Grand Theft Auto Online mission has a plot.
Thereâs no vision here beyond âhereâs some stuff that might seem cool to guys who got too into the Johnny Depp trial and whose two favourite movies are Resorvoir Dogs and Scarfaceâ. Thereâs no context or cohesion either, even though visually everything has the same generic crime game sheen youâd have expected from a clone of a clone of a GTA clone on the Xbox 360. To look at Rockay City is to be shaken around the inside of a shipping container full of Ed Hardy jeans and Steven Seagal movies.
Whatâs it actually like to play? See above. You sneak around for a bit, you shoot some guysâwho are often just innocent people, and who take a lot of bulletsâthen you shoot a lot more, because Rockay City never knows when to turn the volume down. Itâs a âLevel 99 Crime Bossâ mobile game with the violent aspirations (or absence of a moral compass) of a late 90âs PC shooter.
Rockay City had real money spent on it, paid for genuine Hollywood involvement. It was a crime game, it had guns, it spent enough marketing money that it somehow turned upin a Kotaku.com announcement post, it should have meant something to someone. Yet we have, to our collective credit, rejected this game wholesale. The game doesnât just suck, even the idea of it sucks. Itâs a disaster at a conceptual level. Nobody talks about it, nobody plays it; the game is only available on PC, yet isnât on Steam, and its official subreddit hasâŚ242 members.
I canât say Rockay City is good. I canât say itâs bad beyond the ways Iâve already described it (though hereâs its Metacritic page if youâd like to broaden your horizons). I canât say itâs so bad itâs good. I honestly donât think traditional video game quantifiers work here. This isnât a 2023 game release, itâs a black hole in the middle of it, sucking light and energy and washed up old actors into its void.
