Crime Boss: Rockay City sounds like one of those cheap, foreign, scam mobile game titles, like Mafia City. When I finally saw the gameplay, I realized it was a legit game, and on top of that, it was steeped in 90s B movies. I was able to get it on sale for the PS5, and I needed a dumb, turn off your brain game.

The game is set in the Miami-inspired city of Rockay City. Much like Mafia 1’s Lost Haven, I dislike the name of Rockay City. It’s an awkward name. I imagine they are hoping this game may become a series, hence the word soup title. The city itself is every 80s-90s Miami cliche, lots of neon lights, modern white architecture, beaches of bikini-clad women. The art design is very 90s with the bright, clashing colors in geometric patterns, the computers and boomboxes are chunky. The music selection is surprisingly good. There’s the general techno, FPS, background music, but there’s also several licensed tracks. These usually play while you’re managing your gang. Some are classic rock tunes, like Bon Jovi’s Blaze of Glory, but there’s also some modern songs, like Hu’s Wolf Totem.

Crime Boss doesn’t have a traditional narrative mode, instead it’s a roguelike. I’m not a huge fan of roguelikes, but I knew what this game was going in. There’re two sides to gameplay; gang management and heists. You start each run with a piece of turf and you expand across the map of the city. These are done through turf wars. It’s similar to Risk, you choose how many of your guys to throw at the enemy territory. But there’s an FPS component, you play as a generic member of your gang and you’re thrown into a firefight with a rival gang. Your AI gang members are low on self-preservation skills, often running straight into the enemy’s fire. They are mostly there to be meat shields for the enemy to focus fire on while you do most the work. When you are defending your turf, you get to play as Touchdown, the gang captain, who has access to an M60. I could usually hold off a force of superior numbers with just Touchdown and a few goons thanks to that machine gun.

When not fighting for turf, the other aspect of gang management is upgrading your boss level. This is done by buying office decor. Each level up lets you pick one perk that will be persistent across every run. You also hire new crew members, distinct characters who join you on crime missions, and level them up. There’s also new gear you can buy, like better guns or grenades. Each round of the game is broken into days. You can only use your gang and crew members once a day. Crime Boss has a lot of mobile game style systems, but it’s not as money-hungry, they even released some DLC for free. When your run ends, everything, but your boss perks, reset. You lose any crew members and any levels they gained, you’re back to one piece of turf, and you lose your gear. Given the tenuous nature of a run, I never invested in weapons. The base guns handle fine, and money is better spent on other things.

The final gameplay element is crime missions. These are what you bring your crew mates on. The missions can range from “kill rival gang captain” to “loot the warehouse” to “rob a jewelry store”. The robbery/heist missions are my favorite. I enjoy a good heist level. While the “kill rival gang” centric missions often put you in warehouses or docks, the robbery missions have you in downtown Rockay. Stealth is important here as you avoid guards and shutdown cameras. There’s a system to restrain civilians and guards, so you don’t have to kill everyone. I had a few successful robberies where no alarms were triggered, no unnecessary murders, and we got out silently. When missions do go sideways, there is a sort of fun in trying to salvage a job gone bad. The best example is the armored truck robberies. These can’t be stealth missions; you start by shooting the driver and have to saw through the door. It leads to your crew looting an armored truck while under fire.

That said, the gameplay isn’t perfect. You can play as the Boss on missions, but if he dies, your run is over. That’s how all my runs ended. Sometimes it was justified, sometimes it felt like a cheap death. Towards day 5, enemies like to dogpile on you. There’s also no way to abandon a job or call it off early. I had a robbery where I only brought 3 crew members instead of 4. We couldn’t carry enough loot together to trigger the escape van. So, we just had to fight off waves of cops until we died. I’m fine with not having a restart button, I realize it’s against the roguelike game design, but heists going sideways is a classic film trope, give me an option to call off the mission as a failure & attempt to escape. In the turf war missions, you are dropped in random spots on a map, sometimes you get placed in a defensible position, sometimes you’re in the middle of a street surrounded on all sides. That’s when the stuff I disliked about roguelikes started to rear its head. The mission-to-mission gameplay was fun, but conquering half the city to get killed in an unwinnable mission gets annoying when it’s my 6th run. The boss perks do help getting the next run up and running quicker, but I enjoy narrative progression in my stories. After a while it felt like I was spinning wheels with no real chance to reach the end without grinding several more runs. I got a couple hours of fun out of Crime Boss, and I’ll probably pick it up as a “play every now and again” game, but not my primary game. If there’s some big late game shakeup I never got to, I apologize it’s not included here.

The one thing that really drew me to this game was the cast of 90s action movie actors. Given most of these folks are in their late 60s-70s, I think a video game where they look like their 90s selves is a great way for them to get back some relevance. Probably the biggest name in the game is Danny Glover. He plays a crooked cop who’s your contact in the force, unoriginally named Gloves. Kim Bassinger is your sexy money manager. And you play as Travis Baker voiced by Michael Madsen. He has a classic cowboy gangster aesthetic. There’s also a few modern actors in your gang, your consigliere is voiced by Damion Poitier and Touchdown is voiced by Michael Rooker. The big bad Sherrif is voiced by Chuck fucking Norris. The rival gangs are led by celebrities too. Danny Trejo runs a gang of Pedro Pascal ala Narcos look alikes. Vanilla Ice runs the generic hood gang, his character is called Hielo, which is Spanish for ice. The last gang is the bikers ran by Khan, he isn’t voiced by a celeb, but you can’t convince me otherwise that were he not just a garbage of a human, that character would’ve been voiced by Steven Seagal.

The performance of these celebrities run the gamut. Chuck Norris is the worst by far. He delivers monotone lines with no real emotion. I get that’s his schtick, but it just sounds bad here. Danny Glover is barely in the game, so his few moments sound good. Kim Bassinger and Michael Madsen give decent performances, you can tell they’re putting a little effort in. Madsen is a bit all over the place, but he’s trying, which is saying something. Rooker is over the top, but he’s fine. Of all the actors Damion Poitier, hands down, gives the best performance. He is really trying to give a good performance; it’s probably why he has a lion’s share of the dialogue in this game.

As a fan of ‘good bad’ movie reviews, I will give Crime Boss credit, it nails perfectly the feeling of playing a cheesy 90s B-movie. Between the hokey acting, generic gameplay, and extravagant 90sness, it does lend a lot of charm and good will to the game. And I was surprised how many different little cutscenes there were for everything. I expected after my 5th run, I’d start to see the same cutscenes at the beginning. There were a few repeats, but I always saw something new each time. The higher-level crew members, I think, are references to other 90s characters. There’s one who looks like Wayne Knight from Jurassic Park, Tony Soprano, and Mr. Wolfe from Pulp Fiction.

All in all, Crime Boss: Rockay City is a fun little distraction. It nails that 90s bad movie vibe, but the roguelike gameplay does start to wear on me, especially after the 2nd or 3rd unfair death. The heist missions were my favorite. I didn’t get to try co-op, but I could imagine those heists being even more fun. It’s a budget game through and through, but if you are someone who has a nostalgia for the 90s or have the disposition to put hours into a roguelike shooter, I can recommend Crime Boss: Rockay City.