RoboCop: Rogue City Review (l9-jOi29JvfJ)
After Terminator, it was pretty clear what this was going to be. While it's a little pricey, I still don't feel betrayed as with some other AAA games. It tries to stay faithful enough to the source material in most ways, but just as with Terminator, I wish it had more depth. Most of the game has a police station section, followed by either the Detroit "open world" level - which is relatively small for being the single hub level - or a "mission" level. The mission levels are pretty good. It could really do with a NG+ mode, and I would have appreciated some kind of procedurally generated endless mission content in the Detroit hub level to just come back to it and explode some bad guys occasionally. A post-game mission select screen would also have been nice.
Enemy variety is decent. Mechanically is somewhat thin, but not insultingly so. The RPG element is relatively well integrated. One problem is the ED-209 and final bossfights. On hard, those things were SO spongy. Even with max damage, engineering, and a well upgraded pistol, those things took several minutes to whittle down, and the fights weren't very exciting. I am actually glad that I was able to cheese all but one of the ED-209 fights, because dodging would have made those encounters even longer. The last boss is somewhat sad. Neither its visual design, nor its behavior and rigging fit into the Robocop universe. Neither does the other type of robot enemy for that matter.
The game doesn't push you very hard to complete all side objectives, but I suspect you'd lose out on a significant chunk of XP by the end.
The weapons are not exciting but decent for the most part, and I wish some of them were a little better. None of them feel lethal enough, but I assume the difficultly (which isn't very high to begin with) would just be too low to be enjoyable.
It looks really nice, and the environments and props fit really well. Sound design is also pretty decent, and the music is what you expect. They have some kind of soft-punk song or something playing in some sections, which got on my nerves rather quickly, because I thought it was really bland but abrasive. Compared to some recent titles that looked a lot worse, it almost runs acceptably well. It still pretty much forces you to enable the DLSS vaseline if you don't own a $1000+ graphics card, but it's not nearly as bad as the competition.
Most of the environments feel authentic, with good materials, lighting and effects. Some levels have weird architecture, but it doesn't get as blatantly in the way as in some other games.
Now here's a problem that, while not a dealbreaker, it's not insignificant. The writing in general is about as terrible as it was in Terminator, but here it feels more tone deaf. Considering the only real Robocop movie's tone and what social commentary and satire it provides, the writing in this game is pretty low quality and wrong in tone. That goes doubly so for Robocop, the protagonist. It wobbles to and fro between inappropriate subject matter interpretations. To top it off, the game has a kitschy happy ending that is neither bleak nor heroic, and instead gives me a familial and "saved the world" vibe, which doesn't fit the material at all. This style of writing ends up forcing me to make a choice between terrible options almost every time I'm given alternate paths.
The voice acting for Robocop is off. It's WAY too emotional in most situations, and emphasis is not only placed incorrectly within situations, but also within sentences and words. The voice actor's voice also doesn't suit the character well. The accent doesn't fit. I usually wouldn't mind for things that haven't been as strongly imprinted, but Peter Weller's voice has, and it's just too different. Combined with the writer's flip flop between exaggerated pathos/emotion and cold but illogical tone, the atmosphere is cringeworthy way too often.
I'd summarize it as a fun and simple FPS with a handful of flaws, but it's definitely not a waste of time or money, especially compared to many similarly priced products released this year. There is very little replay value. Playing on hard took me 16 hours including almost all of the side missions.