Xbox Series X Review: Robocop: Rogue City (2023)

The first RoboCop (1987) is amazing. This likely isn't news to anyone, but I still find it wild that such a brutal, truly anti-corpofascist film could ever be released by a major studio. And then they made the sequels. RoboCop 2 (1990) is ooooook, it's fine, it has that child drug dealer, and RoboCop 3 is itself a crime. I went to the 2014 reboot and remember nothing about it. They also made some RoboCop video games! They're trash too, except for RoboCop Versus The Terminator (1993) on the Sega Genesis (and definitely not the SNES version), which was stupid hard but had cheats (thank god) and buckets of blood.

Anyway, this is all to say the RoboCop franchise is a total mess. Thankyfully, RoboCop: Rogue City attempts to clean up this mess. Taking place after the events of the second movie, Rogue City is a hybrid FPS and robo-role-playing adventure game, and a large part of it is a tribute to the series. When you're not shooting dudes and walking forward slowly, you're talking to dudes and walking forward slowly. Sometimes they ask you to find cats, find their sons, and hand out parking tickets to cars parked too close to fire hydrants. These parts, especially the more open world sections where you (Mr. RoboCop) walk around the streets of Detroit and talk to folks, can become fairly boring and the conversations drone on for too long. Still, there's some good character work and writing here, with choices that have effects on both the narrative and gameplay, but thankfully this mundane activity is then offset by some incredible shootouts. Rogue City is brutal. You kill guys really good in a lot of different, upgradable ways. This is the best part of the RoboCop Simulator. The combat is incredibly satisfying, in-depth, and shockingly customizable.

RoboCop: Rogue City is a fairly long game for a modern FPS, although too much of the 10 hours or so it takes to complete the game is dedicated to long stretches of dialogue. By the end the of the game, however, I found that the commitment to so much conversation actually worked somewhat in the game's favor and the characterizations paid off. Unfortunately, the final act does wear out the game's welcome by the end with one too many reveals and turns and final final boss battles. Nevertheless, if you dig FPS action and need something new to play, Rogue City is worthwhile.