RoboCop: Rogue City (2023)

Flawed for sure. Shows its limited budget early and often. A couple hours too long with some clunky dialog, and still a blast to play. RoboCop is one of my favorite 80's action movies, so I was able to swallow some of the rough edges here easier than some.

I think that watching, and having a fondness for, RoboCop 1 and 2 would help players enjoy the game. The tone might not work for some (there is a review here on Grouvee that I find maddeningly frustrating because I think the player legitimately doesn't know RoboCop was a movie, and thus has an entirely opposite expectation).

• Playtime: ~15 hours (95% completed)
• Played: 2025
• Expectation: Mixed because adaptations are often bad.

Intro

Rogue City is a FPS with RPG elements. You walk around a small to medium sized area shooting enemies, talking to people, collecting stolen goods and writing parking tickets.

The Good

• Peter Weller does face and voice acting (he's the original RoboCop).
• Returning characters' faces look great.
• Smaller story elements are decent.
• You can help people.
• You can be a dick.
• I laughed a few times.
• They copied some stuff from Deus Ex.
• Lots of memberberries:

The Bad

• No manual saves. I only dared to exit after area transitions because you can't really tell when the game saves.
• The story is lazy, haphazard and nonsensical.
• No dick-shooting skill.
• Beards look awful. Yes, this really stands out.
• Quest-marking skill doesn't mark all quests (hence 95% completed).
• The bomb-defusing quest is awful. Just a fuck-you to the player.
• You need to invest in Engineering skill to crack safes and better upgrade chips, but those barely appear in the second half of the game.
• Some humans look like marionettes:

It took me a while to figure out what it reminded me of. It's the Thunderbirds:

The Ugly

SlowboCop

RoboCop is really slow but they want you to scour each area looking for stolen items and OCP boxes because that's how you level up. Of the roughly 15 hours of playtime i spent 1-2 hours crawling around holding right-mouse (highlight button). And i still missed stuff, which they helpfully tell you after the mission is over.

Tedious combat

Combat starts out fun but gets incredibly boring. You walk through a corridor, find some enemies, hide behind the wall, pop shield/slow-mo, shoot enemies with your Auto-9 then wait for ability cooldown. Other weapons quickly become inferior so there's no variation even in that regard. Early on you breach a wall to flank enemies a la Deus Ex, but that only happens once. Same with hacking turrets (~four times). I didn't even use ricocheting bullets because it's useless against the bullet sponge enemies.

The game is only 15-ish hours long and i still had to take several breaks because i got bored. I only kept going because i knew it was a short game.

Here's an example of the riveting combat. ED-209 is stuck in place and can't even hit me. You spend 1-2 minutes just standing there firing at it endlessly because it's so spongey:

Aside from being dull, combat is also terribly balanced. You don't regenerate health (without an expensive to get skill) so early on you have to be really careful. Especially if you pick the deduction/psychology skills first. Once you upgrade your armor the game becomes easy because you get showered in health kits since some players might not upgrade armor and really need those. The result was that i died early on because they literally dump you in front of ED-209 with no cover and didn't die again except during the bomb defusion quest (hit a barrel and you die, ugh).

Conclusion

Despite the negative aspects, i did kinda like RoboCop. Ironically, the best part of RoboCop isn't being RoboCop but being Murphy. The conversations with people are generally nice. The little side-quests in the police station like getting people to sign a get-well card or dealing with a cop's death help with immersion. Seeing Lewis, ED-209 and RoboCop 2 in a game is also neat. And combat is fun - for the first few hours. It's definitely worth playing.

Rogue City is disappointing also because you can easily imagine the game being better. Don't make us check every inch for interactibles to get XP. Actually use trick shots or alternative solutions in combat. Make it so we walk around (much more quickly) as Lewis/Ulysses in the city, only switching to Robo for talking/shooting. Have regenerating health by default and make Armor less OP. Et cetera.

Game info

If you were wondering roughly how many skill points & chips you get (i put 2 point in Psychology, then levelled Deduction to 10 for the 30% XP bonus):

so far this is awesome but omg its a bit laggy and a bit of an unoptimized mess. had to spend about 10 mins playing in the settings in the main menu to even move the mouse decently. it's also prone to crashing on certain parts it seems.

Despite this though. solid shooter with cool 'scan' mechanic that highlights enemies as soon as they pop out... actually an awesome idea you dont even understand how well that worked in the movie until you play it in this game. the quests/role-playing in this is good and something like a deus ex. in fact, the side quests are maybe the best i've ever played in a game. every one of them relates to some fun or funny police work type scenario. Everything from writing parking tickets to various violations, code enforcements. I'm expecting to rescue a lost kitten at some point when i'm not sending 3-round bursts into nuked out goons chrome domes (the gibs in this splatter all over walls, and stick to ceilings, exposed pipes etc, its something else) i love this game and think its an improvement over terminator and features an interesting and canonical lore-filled world at least as every bit as immersive

keep an eye out for patches maybe.

Robocop looks pretty good, but he's the least robotic felling character model in this whole game.

Besides that, I don't understand what this game's about. It seems that the devs watched the movie and though "wouldn't it be great to be Robocop, killing drug dealers and homeless people?". As if Verhoeven's satire was too subtle for them. By that I mean that there's no humour, no social commentary, nothing but a seemingly straight story about a robot man's quest to get his humanity back and mow down a few thousand punks on the way there.

I'm now thinking. The fact that so much effort went into rendering RoboCop's shiny body just to leave leave human models, animations and voice acting in such a sorry state really tells you where the priorities are. Not in the humanity of the story, but on the sleek robot murderer.