RoboCop: Rogue City

Play it on: PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC

Current goal: Reclaim my humanity

One thing I love about RoboCop: Rogue City is that it’s the kind of mid-budget game that can be completed in a weekend, an increasingly rare and welcome quality in this era of games that want to keep you playing for dozens of hours, if not forever. And yet, despite Rogue City’s manageable runtime, I’ve been playing it off and on (mostly off) for months, doing a few missions every now and then before setting it aside for weeks on end. It’s not that I don’t like it, I like it a lot! It’s just that I feel no need to rush through it. However, I think this long holiday weekend is when I should finally bring my time protecting the citizens of Old Detroit to an end.

If you have yet to try Rogue City for yourself but you have a fondness for first-person shooters and/or Paul Verhoeven’s original 1987 sci-fi masterpiece, let me tell ya, this game absolutely nails it. As RoboCop, you feel hefty and formidable, your footfalls landing with that satisfying hydraulic THUD. And while blasting punks with your signature Auto 9 (that gun that emerges from Murphy’s leg) feels just like you always imagined it would, the best surprise in the game is how much time you spend not shooting dudes, but talking to citizens, investigating crimes, and exploring a (refreshingly) small section of the city that oozes atmosphere, perfectly capturing the urban decay of the film’s setting.

From what I can gather, it seems like Rogue City was a success. My hope is that this results in us getting more mid-budget, modest-sized games in the near future, games that aim to do one thing really well, rather than aiming to do a million things just to keep us busy for hours on end. — Carolyn Petit