AA-games are back! RoboCop is back! Teyon did it, they got Robo loaded up full of baby food and Oreo cookies and put him in a good video game!

It's hard to imagine what RoboCop would've looked like without director Paul Verhoeven, who famously threw his copy of the script in the trash and only dug it out at the insistence of his wife. It is even harder still to imagine Johnathan Kaplan turning down Project X to stay on for RoboCop, or how the film would sound without Basil Poledouris' excellent score, or what shape its themes and humor would take were it not for Michael Miner's thirst for corporate blood. I cannot envision a version of RoboCop absent of Peter Weller, Nancy Allen, Ronny Cox, or Kurtwood Smith bringing Edward Neumeier's characters and world to life. Making a sequel game intended to be accepted as part of the series canon is a tall task, and it's one Teyon managed to pull off about as well as Terminal Reality did with Ghostbusters: The Game. I don't know what's up with these movie franchises struggling to find their place in modern cinemas instead getting excellent games that actually understand the source material, but I'd buy that for [Sixty US Dollars.]

Obviously, RoboCop makes the most sense as a first-person shooter, and for the majority of Rogue City, that's exactly what you get. Stomping around in open environments, rarely taking cover as you blast junkies into hunks of meat with your Auto-9, because RoboCop can take it. Every firefight plays out like the factory shootout from the first film, homing in on scum while shots glance off your solid metal chassis, occasionally grabbing enemies to fling into concrete walls and through high-rise windows, or chucking cans of gas into crowds, or CRTs into skulls, you know, if you want to be a capital C Cop.

You can pick up a variety of other firearms, but outside of the opening few missions, there's very little practical reason to do so. The Auto-9 gets the job done, start to finish, and it can be upgraded with PCB boards that can increase penetration, damage, and add additional upgrades like bullet split. I ran through most of the game with a board that provided unlimited ammo, an auto-fed clip, and enhanced gore. The end result is, in a word, ridiculous. Teyon ought to be commended for making the Auto-9 feel every bit as good to use in the game as you'd expect it to from watching the movie.

These linear sets of shooting levels are interspersed with trips back to Rogue City's two hub areas: the police station and downtown Detroit. It's during these sections of the game that Rogue City more closely resembles an immersive sim, with dialog trees and skill checks influencing the outcomes of side stories. Blowing up chop shops and de-escalating stand-offs by promising the perp three hots and a cot (a veritable golden ticket out of the hellscape of Detroit) can be initiated at your leisure, usually between handing out tickets and dancing for children. I like to call that serving the public trust.

It's just a shame that skill checks and the number of available side quests dry up the further in you get. A lot of it feels front-loaded, though there's still a lot of joy in walking around downtown and seeing the residual effects of those early choices. Near the start of the game, I had the option to let a graffiti artist go or fine him an unreasonable amount of money. I decided to uphold the law and bankrupt his ass, giving me the prompt "RoboCop has made an enemy of the graffiti artist," and later causing a large anti-RoboCop mural to appear in retribution. Don't know how he afforded all that paint. Scumbag probably stole it.

The subversive humor of the movie is alive and well, though the writing is a little flat near the start of the game and some performances are a bit questionable, save for Peter Weller who reprises his role as Murphy/Robo and doesn't sound like he's skipped a day since RoboCop 2. Once things gets going, Rogue City keeps its momentum. Literal bratty children lecturing adults on not voting (who in turn threaten to punch them in the face), letters from prisoners upset that they're forced into a baking program that makes them look soft, and Robo reuniting an elderly woman with her lost cat before destroying all her personal property in a shootout and just leaving is so perfectly in tone with RoboCop. There's plenty of direct references to the movie as well, and they never feel out of place, like the Delta City model one of OCP's executives collapsed into being unceremoniously stored in a supply closet that you can explore, or Kaplan again calling for a police strike in every scene he's in (Cops don't strike!) In any other game these callbacks could feel pandering, but in Rogue City they provide a sense of continuity.

Unfortunately, Rogue City runs about as well as RoboCop does while trying to arrest Dick Jones. I frequently had visual effects stop working, including a screen that was meant to depict a key character during a climactic moment in the game which remained blank. Audio frequently desynced and became covered in a heavy whine that required me to reset the game more than once, and artifacting is noticeably present during camera cuts when characters are talking. Temporal anti-aliasing also rears its ugly head once again, caking Rogue City's visuals in a muddy filter.

If Rogue City were a bit more cleaned up and embraced the immersive sim model more fully, I'd say this is a 5/5, but even as-is, I had more fun with it than most AAA releases this year.