Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop was the film in my school that everyone under the age of eighteen wanted to watch but wasn’t allowed to. Fortunately for my friend and I, we managed to sneakily watch his Dad copy on VHS. As a naïve tweenager I was blown away by what I saw. The hyper-violence, the dark satire, and the coolest hero I’d ever laid eyes on; Robocop proved an explosive experience that only led to a handful of sleepless nights due to nightmares about melting faces. Since his iconic debut though, times have been hard for the cyborg cop. A series of lacklustre film sequels and an awful modern remake have all helped dull Robocop’s once-shiny armour. Step in RoboCop: Rogue City, the first video game starring the titular hero in years. Has developer Teyon’s latest FPS got what it takes to restore the RoboCop legacy? Well, unfortunately, no.
RoboCop: Rogue City is… good?!
11.10.2023 - 09:53 / eurogamer.net / Paul Verhoeven
Forgive the surprise, but 80s action movies haven't typically made for the smoothest transitions to modern video games. Predator had Predator: Hunting Grounds, for instance, "a naff waste of great material". Terminator had Terminator: Resistance — "generic and boring". The infamous Aliens: Colonial Marines was admittedly followed by Alien Isolation and the enjoyable enough, fun-flamethrowing-with-friends of Aliens: Fireteam Elite, but still. When RoboCop: Rogue City was announced and subsequently delayed back in 2021 by Polish developer Teyon — the studio behind Terminator: Resistance and its sumptuously awkward first-person sex scene, no less — I can't, personally, say I was too optimistic.
And yet! I've played some of RoboCop's new demo in the current Steam Next Fest and actually… it's not bad? In fact it might actually be kind of good?
The setup here is simple enough, and delivered through a pleasantly hammy introduction of down-the-lens newscasting and caricatured bad guy monologues. There's a new threat in town — an unknown ringleader literally called The New Guy In Town by the city's press — and it's got all the preexisting gangs especially excited. You're thrown into a classic tower block raid, with some relatively simple whack-a-mole gunfights and a couple typical hostage situations providing a bit of basic fun.
The magic is in the pairing — RoboCop's nature as another 80s action protagonist that feels like he originated in video games first, less man-with-gun than a sentient gun with limbs attached. Have you ever felt like a bit of a giant baby in modern action games, spoon-fed your activities while thoughtlessly following orders from one waypoint to the next? Consider Officer Murphy as he slowly toddles into battle in his nappy-like black rubber Y-fronts, transfixed by the icons on his HUD, turning all designated enemies into chunks of practical effect pulp with a mindless burst of his booming, infinite ammo hand cannon.
It's wonderfully funny. And as Rogue City reminds you, Paul Verhoeven's original RoboCop is also a surprisingly rich text, at least compared to some of the other video game converts. The anchorman of that opening cinematic has a nice bit of deadpan delivery about some gormless cops, our brave heroes, returning home after getting lost and accidentally shooting a load of endangered animals. The police force of Old Detroit is over-militarised and under-trained, and privately funded by some mega conglomerate called Omni Consumer Products. «Dirtbag detected,» RoboCop announces after exiting a lift. Every drug-dealing bad guy's a scumbag or a slimeball, or occasionally a slime-bag, here in the ultimate Reagan world.
In other words, at least in the early hours of Rogue City,
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