RoboCop: Rogue City

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

Current goal: Serve the public trust. Protect the innocent. Uphold the law.

I didn’t make time for RoboCop: Rogue City when it came out last year, but I’ve started delving into it now after picking it up on sale recently, and I’m finding it to be a pretty great example of a kind of game that rarely gets made anymore, the kind that exists between the tight focus of low-budget indie games and the colossal expanse of big-budget blockbusters. It’s a mainstream, mid-budget game that doesn’t try to pass itself off as something else. It wears its looping, canned animations openly, the evidence of its being a production that couldn’t take the “spare no expense” approach, so as you walk around its environments, you may at times feel like you’re playing a PS3 game, though in a way I found endearing rather than off-putting. Instead, the folks making it put their time and money into the things that mattered most, things like making sure playing as RoboCop feels right, hefty and powerful, that the violence is spectacularly over the top, and that the world exudes the feeling of grimy urban decay that pervades the Detroit of Paul Verhoeven’s original film.

I’ve also been pleasantly surprised by just how much time you spend doing things other than gunning down punks. There are mini-open-world sections that see you doing actual police work—searching for clues, questioning people, tracking down suspects—and, at least in the early going, it seems that the ongoing theme of Murphy’s lingering humanity (and how, to the corporate jerkwads at OCP, that humanity is nothing but a problem to be solved) could be handled in some interesting ways. I hope I get to take out some of those corporate jerkwads, too, before all is said and done. It wouldn’t feel like a proper RoboCop story without that.—Carolyn Petit