As a huge Robocop fan, I was really hoping to like this game and I think it does succeed on several levels as a "AA" title. But the whole package feels pretty undercooked. A lot of this came down to the story and characters. The part where the game needed to succeed the most - Robocop - it succeeds with, which is great. They got Peter Weller back, they were true to the character, he has a lot of good lines.

It's in literally every other character in the game where it falls short. No offense to the devs, but they needed someone better to either write or translate this game, or both. It's clear from playing this for five minutes that this was not written natively in English, but even if it was, a lot of the dialogue and situations would still be dumb, and not in a funny way. The story of this game is aggressively simple and has interesting elements but doesn't bring anything together in a satisfying way. It does nothing that the original movie didn't already do. Maybe they wanted to play it safe, which I can respect, especially working with Peter Weller who seems very protective of the character, aside from apparently just being sort of a jerk. He contributed lines and ideas to the script of the movie, and I'm sure he did to this game as well and that might be why Robocop as a character is still so good in this. But playing it safe makes the game very unmemorable. All the new characters are one-note and lame. The most interesting one, Bob Morton's replacement whose attempt to kill Robocop with an army of crappy drones later in the game is treated as just a corporate move that didn't work out, and nobody gives him any grief for it (very fitting for this franchise), dies.

Ulysses sucks, Pickles sucks (at least we get to hear Weller say his name), the journalist sucks, Dr. Blanche doesn't totally suck but should have had way more focus, and the game does you the disservice of making you feel like you have some real impact on these characters' stories through your dialogue choices. What you have impact on - surprise surprise - is a series of jpegs with voiceover that play over the game's ending. Just don't put the dumb dialogue choices and "Dr. Blanche appreciated that" popups in the game at all. People laud this game for not playing at being something bigger than it is when it has a huge example of doing exactly that.

It feels like there were about 5 voice actors in this game. They got a good impersonator for Lewis (Nancy Allen still sounds exactly like that so I dunno if they weren't willing to pay her or something), but most of the other characters sound awful, especially the ones from the movies - Robert DoQui's police chief, and Dan O'Herlihy's "Old Man". Dan had a unique voice, and his character is pretty important to the plot of this game, which, quite admirably, attempts to bridge Robocop 2 and 3, so one of the key things it needs to explain is why the Old Man isn't in 3. Yet they totally flubbed it, he sounds awful. There are multiple NPCs whose voices don't match their faces at all. The line delivery is wooden which doesn't help when the lines weren't written by a native English speaker. It's not the fault of the writers and I'm sure they tried their best, but it doesn't make a great product.

The game does have a few funny moments - notably, when you get a triumphant "Mission Complete" popup after informing a woman her son has died - but it also has a lot of jokes that fall flat.

Story isn't the only thing in a game though, despite what those who hate the later Metal Gear Solid games would imply. But the gameplay in this game also isn't too special. Yes, you feel a bit like Robocop. You walk slowly, can take a lot of hits, and can easily target enemies. There's a fairly nice sense of progression as you use skill points. And of course it's fun to shoot the scum of Old Detroit. But that's it. You don't get any cool alternate weapons until the end of the game, there's no sections that change the gameplay in unique ways, no little on-rails driving sections despite a car chase shootout being the first action scene in the original movie. Another obvious thing from the movie that should have been integrated was Robocop's thermal vision that can even see through walls. The scene where he grabs a guy through a wall is an iconic scene that I would have loved to emulate. They don't even have you use Robocop's night vision more than once or twice. I will say though, it was cool to unlock the ricochet ability to shoot people behind cover, and the upgrade system that keeps the main gun your best weapon is maybe the game's smartest feature - they should have done more with it, like maybe have random modifiers like putting a filter on the visuals if you take a 5% damage decrease.

Aside from the faces of most NPCs (which...I guess is kind of a big thing), the graphics in the game are awesome. UE5 is crazy. But there's not much I can say about that.

So you can see what I mean when I say the package feels undercooked. I've just described every ingredient here. I don't know how this all comes together to make the 8/10 game others seems to think this is. I love Robocop, and I think there's some great potential here. If the devs make a sequel, or maybe a similar game with a different character (perhaps another police-type who isn't quite as forgiving as Robo), if they get different writers, different voice-actors, have slightly more varied combat, go even further with the gun upgrade system, and turn the open downtown Detroit area in this game into a small but dense open world you can drive around in, they really could have a great game.