I was looking forward to Rogue City ever since its announcement because Teyon’s previous game, Terminator Resistance, was a janky, yet solid game that genuinely felt like a quality coda to Terminator 1 and 2; so I was anticipating what they would do with adapting another beloved 80’s sci-fi movie. Rogue City proves to be a step up over Resistance as well as how Teyon is really starting to come into their own as a great FPS dev. As I’ve seen people bring up, Teyon feel like the spiritual successor to Starbreeze in how they design their FPSes, namely on having hub level design with sidequests to do that add a bunch of character to the cast and world.
Rogue City captures the tone and spirit of its source material so well, even better than Resistance did for Terminator. I was a little worried at first that Teyon may not get Verhoeven’s biting satire of Reagan Era America, but I was glad to see they definitely did. There’s no shortage of darkly comedic radio ads and other bits of environmental details that capture Robocop’s satirical cyberpunk setting, like for instance how selling organs to dedicated organ dealer corpos have become an officially sanctioned way to pay for healthcare. The writing overall is actually quite good too and manages to be a worthy follow-up to the original movie as well as actually working in the sequels in interesting ways. There is some legit funny moments and its cast of OC side characters are fleshed out enough to be entertaining. Teyon’s love of the series is so clear as they put so much care into bringing Robocop into game form and one of the clearest examples of this is that you can shoot every human enemy in the dick.
Teyon captured playing as Robocop so very well. Murphy is just a powerwalking juggernaut, throwing goons around like ragdolls and exploding them with a punch. Robocop’s Auto 9 also feels powerful and the game has a neat upgrade system for it where you find upgrade boards that you can tweak with circuits you find that can give you give better damage, bigger magazines, better armor piercing, and unique upgrades like an autoloader. The boards give you a nice bit of customization on how you want to spec your gun.
The game does actually have some roleplaying too as Murphy has different skills you can go down that can grant you new abilities like a charge dash, bullet time, and super armor. There’s even instances where your skills come up in dialogue and can affect missions. Unfortunately, it doesn’t fully utilize like them like say Deus Ex and VTM: B did. Like for example a high enough engineering skill lets you hack turrets, but turrets don’t really show up until towards the endgame and in most instances physically trying to hack the turret terminal is impractical compared to just shooting them. I do still appreciate the ambition and it does add some nice flavor to the game. There is a neat roleplaying mechanic around how you have Murphy treat his directives, namely if he upholds the public trust or the law and how the law isn’t always right. It doesn’t dive into this dichotomy too much, but its nice little facet in an FPS based on an 80’s movie to have, and it does affect your relationships with characters and how some things play out in the ending.
Really the only complaints I have is that the first ED-209 fight could probably use a second pass because they barely give you any weapons to fight it with so it’s pretty spongey, especially if you didn’t really spec into combat skills at that point in the game like I did and it’s even more apparent in the later fights where they give you armories to fight them with. I also lost saves that took me back a bit, but it only happened once, and the rest of the game was otherwise smooth sailing.
Rogue City overall is a great game with a whole bunch of charm and clearly made with a lot of love and care. Definitely recommended for not only Robocop fans but anybody who just wants a good ass style of FPS that we don’t get as much of anymore. Also yeah, gonna echo a sentiment I’ve been seeing and say, “Teyon make Escape from New York next, please.”
Rogue City captures the tone and spirit of its source material so well, even better than Resistance did for Terminator. I was a little worried at first that Teyon may not get Verhoeven’s biting satire of Reagan Era America, but I was glad to see they definitely did. There’s no shortage of darkly comedic radio ads and other bits of environmental details that capture Robocop’s satirical cyberpunk setting, like for instance how selling organs to dedicated organ dealer corpos have become an officially sanctioned way to pay for healthcare. The writing overall is actually quite good too and manages to be a worthy follow-up to the original movie as well as actually working in the sequels in interesting ways. There is some legit funny moments and its cast of OC side characters are fleshed out enough to be entertaining. Teyon’s love of the series is so clear as they put so much care into bringing Robocop into game form and one of the clearest examples of this is that you can shoot every human enemy in the dick.
Teyon captured playing as Robocop so very well. Murphy is just a powerwalking juggernaut, throwing goons around like ragdolls and exploding them with a punch. Robocop’s Auto 9 also feels powerful and the game has a neat upgrade system for it where you find upgrade boards that you can tweak with circuits you find that can give you give better damage, bigger magazines, better armor piercing, and unique upgrades like an autoloader. The boards give you a nice bit of customization on how you want to spec your gun.
The game does actually have some roleplaying too as Murphy has different skills you can go down that can grant you new abilities like a charge dash, bullet time, and super armor. There’s even instances where your skills come up in dialogue and can affect missions. Unfortunately, it doesn’t fully utilize like them like say Deus Ex and VTM: B did. Like for example a high enough engineering skill lets you hack turrets, but turrets don’t really show up until towards the endgame and in most instances physically trying to hack the turret terminal is impractical compared to just shooting them. I do still appreciate the ambition and it does add some nice flavor to the game. There is a neat roleplaying mechanic around how you have Murphy treat his directives, namely if he upholds the public trust or the law and how the law isn’t always right. It doesn’t dive into this dichotomy too much, but its nice little facet in an FPS based on an 80’s movie to have, and it does affect your relationships with characters and how some things play out in the ending.
Really the only complaints I have is that the first ED-209 fight could probably use a second pass because they barely give you any weapons to fight it with so it’s pretty spongey, especially if you didn’t really spec into combat skills at that point in the game like I did and it’s even more apparent in the later fights where they give you armories to fight them with. I also lost saves that took me back a bit, but it only happened once, and the rest of the game was otherwise smooth sailing.
Rogue City overall is a great game with a whole bunch of charm and clearly made with a lot of love and care. Definitely recommended for not only Robocop fans but anybody who just wants a good ass style of FPS that we don’t get as much of anymore. Also yeah, gonna echo a sentiment I’ve been seeing and say, “Teyon make Escape from New York next, please.”
4 Comments
The last Robocop game was made by Titus two decades ago, so yeah, it was pretty dire before.
i was thinkin like teyon could make a great john woo game because of how obliterating this game's combat can get, but escape from new york sounds way more fitting for them lol. that'd be insane
@Yeij Yeah, Escape from New York would really fit Teyon's style of FPS like Terminator and Robocop so well and plus they have some flexibility in fleshing out the setting some more because the OG movie hints at a bunch of stuff but doesn't dive too deep, like how many of the people imprisoned in Manhattan are actually violent criminals and not just political prisoners of the fascist regime? Would be rad if they could get Kurt Russell back and John Carpenter doing the soundtrack.
FallenGrace
7 months ago