robocop fans are eating so fucking good this year. with the 5 hour making-of documentary released and now a pristinely faithful game, i can say that teyon made the true robocop 3 that the fans deserved. robocop 3 isn't a horrendous movie but it's depressingly far detached from the original it's supposed to build off of. less violent, less satirical, less paul verhoeven-isms, it's almost so sad that i wouldnt recommend it, but it has such a goofy ending it's worth watching if youre a robocop fan. trust me, robo3 is schlocky to all hell and can get so bad that it becomes good. also otomo was tragically underused since hes a cool monster, shoutout phil tippett. robocop 3 aside, what i meant to bring up was that rogue city is more robocop than one of the actual 3 robocop movies. its gore matches and surpasses the original movie's squibs, it's absurdly ironic, and, buddy, these Poles fucking love paul verhoeven. shoutout Poland, been enjoying lotsa games outta there from what i can remember. the hud, the lovely sluggish movement, the explosive gunshots of the auto-9, the gorgeous model recreations, the fantastically rebuilt detroit (even though robocop was filmed in texas), and Peter fucking Weller is BACK as Robo. it's more than a love letter to the IP, it's almost a rebirth with how well-executed everything was. like i feel that more people could get into Robocop just from the first level of this game.
i was gonna buy alan wake 2 but since i dont want to give epic games any of my money, i gladly bought teyon's robocop FPS after having enjoyed my time with their terminator game. their terminator game was clunky and rough around the edges, had some design i wasnt a big fan of, but good god was it a terminator game. from music to visuals to worldbuilding, their terminator game was exactly like another film entry in the franchise. robocop rogue city follows suit. it's all so beautifully grimey. rain running off bricks, damp asphalt streets, dilapidated apartments, oh we're in hyper-decayed detroit baby. thankfully, for a UE5 game, it actually has some style to it. it doesn't have that off-putting tech demo aura to its visuals, something i sometimes felt with the system shock remake (that game is still quite good looking though dont get me wrong). rogue city is somehow probably the best use of UE5 that ive ever seen. everything is photorealistic yet stylish to fit robocop's aesthetic. the human models are bit too fake at times, especially with their almost stiff animations (which were perfect for robo so im not talking about him). the environments thankfully take up more screenspace and focus in the game as they're phenomenal. every piece of rubble, debris, and bit of destroyed wall is wonderfully included before and after you annihilate a room. the music is great, especially the rendition of the robocop theme which followed the first film instead of pulling a robocop 2 and doing its own thing. hearing those strings as i marched through halls and gunning down punks is so fucking empowering. it was almost sickening being the literal fist of the law, almost like being a jingoist chopper gunner spraying hellfire into a jungle. granted that was hyperbolic but the power of the robocop theme man, i cant understate it, i'd love to hear that shit as i shot down a nationalist from their huey. gunshots are explosive, but youll be hearing the auto-9's bursts more than anything. weapons aren't that interesting in rogue city. your auto-9 has infinite ammo and can be upgraded, so its your go to. the guns you can pick up are superfluous with the exception of the explosive weapons. the grenade launcher, rocket launcher, and cobra rifle are all great fun and useful to deal with groups and armored enemies. but even then, get your auto-9 to full auto and pierce armor and youre good to go.
rogue city isn't really anything remarkable as an FPS. it's slow and not too varied. you meet pretty much every enemy in the first 2-3 levels and the only noteworthy ones are the bosses. you'll be exploding heads, organic or metal, for the entirety of the game with the same gun. enemies amount to dudes with different guns, snipers and grenadiers are the most dangerous ones (suicide bombers would be noteworthy but they only appeared once in the game lol). mowing them down with the auto-9 though kinda just makes up for how uniform the enemy roster is. it's beyond satisfying to obliterate a room in trying to kill just 3 guys. in the year where the supposed f.e.a.r. successor, trepang2, was released i would not have guessed that a robocop game did f.e.a.r.'s explosive gunfights and tight combat encounters better. though to be fair the combat doesn't really reach anything spectacular until youve put some points into the skill trees, specifically the slow-mo ability and ricochet ability. these two abilities singlehandedly made combat more enjoyable by taking the power fantasy to monolithic heights. finally, i can recreate one of the best parts of robocop 2. initially i wasnt a big fan of the skills trees, still am a bit iffy on them. as they currently stand, its a bit lame that these fun abilities (sometimes even necessary on higher difficulties) are locked behind an exp system, but player progression is always cool. i feel that it wouldve been better if teyon dug deeper into the immersive sim itch that im assuming influenced development. this is far from an imsim, it's a full blown shooter, but it holds elements of deus ex exploration and investigation in its small hub world of downtown detroit. cobbling together solutions from either questioning a witness or getting all the clues from the environment was always a neat albeit not too complex experience since many of these extra choices are relegated to skill checks. this minor 2+2=4 but so does 1+3 way of allowing one or two other ways of progressing a side quest brought up these side activities by a lot and i just wished rogue city delved more into that alongside its "important" dialogue.
rogue city's story is good but flawed. it's borderline copaganda, but i find it hard to call that since this is like an ideal world if cops really were altruistic selfless good guys and it was solely an evil capitalist conglomerate that was against the community. eh rogue city probably just is more pro-cop than it is critical of the police, but im coping since i love robocop so much. that isn't to say that it's sucking a fat hog, many times in the game you get to choose to help others or let them go even if it's against the law. dont give a kid a $100 fine for tagging a wall or let god's drunkest soldier enjoy his stupor, there are little moments that show policing can be humane if done by the right person. then there's bigger moments like helping a journalist expose how delta city is actually forcing people into homelessness, being a whistleblower for the good of the people rather than a company executive or a judge. however, teyon had a different focus on this game's main story. what rogue city instead decided to succeed in was robocop's humanity. alex murphy is dead, legally and literally, but his spirit lives on in his reanimated corpse entombed by steel and circuits and struggles to understand itself in its violated state. exploring who alex murphy was and who robocop is are the big servings of meat this game gives the player and it does so wonderfully and cheesily that it seriously just hurt me when i remembered this wasn't robocop 3. the heart strings were pulled ngl. what i was mostly surprised by was how tiresome it felt to be bombarded by every person asking if i really did think alex murphy was still alive. like man leave me alone, murphy is right here kicking ass, get that through your thick skull. enemies at the end of the auto-9's barrel but also outside of battle with their sour remarks or disparagements. when it all came together at the end, it honestly felt triumphant to see murphy feel comfortable in his bulletproof shell and remaining skin. the people rooted for robo and i unintentionally joined in after not expecting to be so invested in the character development for an FPS game. aside from that, the best part of the writing is the comedy. it's absurd, it's stupid, it's nonchalant, overall a lovely time. ads about getting your family cremated and the ashes sent into space, ed-209 still trips on stairs, OCP is full of suits with sticks up their asses, and you can shoot enemies in the nuts. wonderful.
overall a fantastic shooter. strip away the robocop and it becomes another AA FPS game with minor RPG elements. however, even if it wasn't a robocop game, it's competent and fun. genuinely, robocop fan or not, the shooting and combat are so destructive it's impossible to not enjoy it. it feels so good to play a shooter where it's arcadey but not hyperactively trying to make me jump around an arena or punishing me for being aggressive for realism's sake. i like a good in between every once in a while, a good shooter doesn't always have to be titanfall 2 or utrakill or tarkov. maybe play rogue city above normal if youre familiar with FPSs (i played on hard), but this game gets so much right it's hard for it to do wrong by you. quite possibly goty material, fucking primo ultraviolence. i'd buy that for a dollar! x50
saw some people say that teyon should make an 'escape from new york' game. i agree with this sentiment but would like to propose john woo's 'a better tomorrow' as an alternative, or big trouble in little china if we're gonna stick to just american action flicks. judge dredd would be neat too. so many adaptations to beg for.
i was gonna buy alan wake 2 but since i dont want to give epic games any of my money, i gladly bought teyon's robocop FPS after having enjoyed my time with their terminator game. their terminator game was clunky and rough around the edges, had some design i wasnt a big fan of, but good god was it a terminator game. from music to visuals to worldbuilding, their terminator game was exactly like another film entry in the franchise. robocop rogue city follows suit. it's all so beautifully grimey. rain running off bricks, damp asphalt streets, dilapidated apartments, oh we're in hyper-decayed detroit baby. thankfully, for a UE5 game, it actually has some style to it. it doesn't have that off-putting tech demo aura to its visuals, something i sometimes felt with the system shock remake (that game is still quite good looking though dont get me wrong). rogue city is somehow probably the best use of UE5 that ive ever seen. everything is photorealistic yet stylish to fit robocop's aesthetic. the human models are bit too fake at times, especially with their almost stiff animations (which were perfect for robo so im not talking about him). the environments thankfully take up more screenspace and focus in the game as they're phenomenal. every piece of rubble, debris, and bit of destroyed wall is wonderfully included before and after you annihilate a room. the music is great, especially the rendition of the robocop theme which followed the first film instead of pulling a robocop 2 and doing its own thing. hearing those strings as i marched through halls and gunning down punks is so fucking empowering. it was almost sickening being the literal fist of the law, almost like being a jingoist chopper gunner spraying hellfire into a jungle. granted that was hyperbolic but the power of the robocop theme man, i cant understate it, i'd love to hear that shit as i shot down a nationalist from their huey. gunshots are explosive, but youll be hearing the auto-9's bursts more than anything. weapons aren't that interesting in rogue city. your auto-9 has infinite ammo and can be upgraded, so its your go to. the guns you can pick up are superfluous with the exception of the explosive weapons. the grenade launcher, rocket launcher, and cobra rifle are all great fun and useful to deal with groups and armored enemies. but even then, get your auto-9 to full auto and pierce armor and youre good to go.
rogue city isn't really anything remarkable as an FPS. it's slow and not too varied. you meet pretty much every enemy in the first 2-3 levels and the only noteworthy ones are the bosses. you'll be exploding heads, organic or metal, for the entirety of the game with the same gun. enemies amount to dudes with different guns, snipers and grenadiers are the most dangerous ones (suicide bombers would be noteworthy but they only appeared once in the game lol). mowing them down with the auto-9 though kinda just makes up for how uniform the enemy roster is. it's beyond satisfying to obliterate a room in trying to kill just 3 guys. in the year where the supposed f.e.a.r. successor, trepang2, was released i would not have guessed that a robocop game did f.e.a.r.'s explosive gunfights and tight combat encounters better. though to be fair the combat doesn't really reach anything spectacular until youve put some points into the skill trees, specifically the slow-mo ability and ricochet ability. these two abilities singlehandedly made combat more enjoyable by taking the power fantasy to monolithic heights. finally, i can recreate one of the best parts of robocop 2. initially i wasnt a big fan of the skills trees, still am a bit iffy on them. as they currently stand, its a bit lame that these fun abilities (sometimes even necessary on higher difficulties) are locked behind an exp system, but player progression is always cool. i feel that it wouldve been better if teyon dug deeper into the immersive sim itch that im assuming influenced development. this is far from an imsim, it's a full blown shooter, but it holds elements of deus ex exploration and investigation in its small hub world of downtown detroit. cobbling together solutions from either questioning a witness or getting all the clues from the environment was always a neat albeit not too complex experience since many of these extra choices are relegated to skill checks. this minor 2+2=4 but so does 1+3 way of allowing one or two other ways of progressing a side quest brought up these side activities by a lot and i just wished rogue city delved more into that alongside its "important" dialogue.
rogue city's story is good but flawed. it's borderline copaganda, but i find it hard to call that since this is like an ideal world if cops really were altruistic selfless good guys and it was solely an evil capitalist conglomerate that was against the community. eh rogue city probably just is more pro-cop than it is critical of the police, but im coping since i love robocop so much. that isn't to say that it's sucking a fat hog, many times in the game you get to choose to help others or let them go even if it's against the law. dont give a kid a $100 fine for tagging a wall or let god's drunkest soldier enjoy his stupor, there are little moments that show policing can be humane if done by the right person. then there's bigger moments like helping a journalist expose how delta city is actually forcing people into homelessness, being a whistleblower for the good of the people rather than a company executive or a judge. however, teyon had a different focus on this game's main story. what rogue city instead decided to succeed in was robocop's humanity. alex murphy is dead, legally and literally, but his spirit lives on in his reanimated corpse entombed by steel and circuits and struggles to understand itself in its violated state. exploring who alex murphy was and who robocop is are the big servings of meat this game gives the player and it does so wonderfully and cheesily that it seriously just hurt me when i remembered this wasn't robocop 3. the heart strings were pulled ngl. what i was mostly surprised by was how tiresome it felt to be bombarded by every person asking if i really did think alex murphy was still alive. like man leave me alone, murphy is right here kicking ass, get that through your thick skull. enemies at the end of the auto-9's barrel but also outside of battle with their sour remarks or disparagements. when it all came together at the end, it honestly felt triumphant to see murphy feel comfortable in his bulletproof shell and remaining skin. the people rooted for robo and i unintentionally joined in after not expecting to be so invested in the character development for an FPS game. aside from that, the best part of the writing is the comedy. it's absurd, it's stupid, it's nonchalant, overall a lovely time. ads about getting your family cremated and the ashes sent into space, ed-209 still trips on stairs, OCP is full of suits with sticks up their asses, and you can shoot enemies in the nuts. wonderful.
overall a fantastic shooter. strip away the robocop and it becomes another AA FPS game with minor RPG elements. however, even if it wasn't a robocop game, it's competent and fun. genuinely, robocop fan or not, the shooting and combat are so destructive it's impossible to not enjoy it. it feels so good to play a shooter where it's arcadey but not hyperactively trying to make me jump around an arena or punishing me for being aggressive for realism's sake. i like a good in between every once in a while, a good shooter doesn't always have to be titanfall 2 or utrakill or tarkov. maybe play rogue city above normal if youre familiar with FPSs (i played on hard), but this game gets so much right it's hard for it to do wrong by you. quite possibly goty material, fucking primo ultraviolence. i'd buy that for a dollar! x50
saw some people say that teyon should make an 'escape from new york' game. i agree with this sentiment but would like to propose john woo's 'a better tomorrow' as an alternative, or big trouble in little china if we're gonna stick to just american action flicks. judge dredd would be neat too. so many adaptations to beg for.