Robocop: Rogue City starts tonally similar to the first movie with Robocop himself feeling like a monstrosity as enemies cower in fear and only charge at you when taking high doses of PCP. Robocop isn’t a badass, but the husk of a man denied peace in death that has been turned into a machine for corporate use. It's effective and shows that the developers at least understand the source material on some level.

However, that quickly falls to the wayside as the game becomes pure power fantasy. Usually, this is where I would complain about this being a failure akin to making an unironically "cool" Starship Troopers game and that any attempt at a sincere exploration of Robocop as a tragic character is undone by gleefully exploding enemy heads fruits, leaving coats of thick, raspberry jam all the walls.

But it's hard to care when it's just so much... fun... Robocop feels fantastic to play as you pick-up fucking motorcycles and throw them into crowds of enemies or shoot mercenaries in the dick because the rest of their body is covered in armour.

It's also the closest we've gotten to a game structured like The Darkness in forever. Levels are broken up by small, dense hub areas that provide many side quests of overall sound quality (we love saving kittens from burning buildings and solving political murders).

Decision making highlights an exciting concept even though it isn’t complex nor does it necessarily shape the world. Robocop has three prime derivatives: serve the public trust, protect the innocent, and uphold the law. Interestingly, Rogue City posits that sometimes the first two are in direct conflict with the latter. For example, the game has an obfuscated binary morality system that involves public trust vs. upholding the law. You will make decisions that may bend or even break the law to protect a citizen, but this will increase the public's trust in Robocop, suggesting that often, the law is not justice.

But it has its.. trouble. While it is very obviously anti-corporate and pro-citizen–one of the components of the plot is that OCP is essentially scamming homes out from underneath Detroiters so they can create a new city on top of the ruins of Detroit–; its message is muddied by its dedication to not showing the police as an inherently antagonistic force under its socioeconomic system and instead as a force for good within the community with rotten apples and corruption from corporate influence. Politically, the developers are so close, yet so far.

Nevertheless, Rogue City is pretty fucking great and feels video gamey in all of the right ways. It proves that we desperately need more focused, small-scale experiences that aren’t designed to capture a 90+ score on Metacritic.