RoboCop: Rogue City Review

13.01.2024 - 01:49 / gameinformer.com / Marcus Stewart / Peter Weller / Alex Murphy

RoboCop: Rogue City is likely the best game the action hero has ever starred in. That bar isn’t tough to hurdle, but the adventure delivers plenty of thrills for fans to be excited about. This narrative-driven first-person shooter has a loving reverence for the films and a good understanding of its protagonist, swinging for the fences with a lengthy original story, fun references, and plenty of enjoyably cheesy humor. Unfortunately, like the franchise’s vision of Detroit, Rogue City is very rough around the edges, resulting in a flawed hero but one that’s ultimately entertaining to patrol with. 

Set between the events of RoboCop 2 and 3 , the titular cyborg formerly known as Alex Murphy finds himself pulled in all directions. A mysterious figure known as “The New Guy” has arrived to rally Detroit's top gangs to wreak havoc for an unknown sinister purpose. The police department is pressed under the thumb of Omni Consumer Products’ (OCP) supremely unlikable corporate stooge Max Becker, who views RoboCop and the police as ineffective relics of the past. Myriad of smaller threads vie for RoboCop’s attention, such as a snooping journalist seeking your aid in exposing OCP secrets, therapy sessions with a doctor looking to learn what makes you tick, and a new rookie partner who’s also an OCP informant among others.

By and large, the game does a good job of tying these threads into an entertaining and cohesive story full of twists and turns. Although the 20-hour adventure overstays its welcome by the last act with several red herrings and false endings, Rogue City is a better RoboCop 3 than the movie RoboCop 3 . It’s fun to hear actor Peter Weller reprise his role as RoboCop, and while the other performances are decent at best, the character models and animations are as robotic as RoboCop himself. Lip-syncing is especially bad, and it outright breaks in several scenes, giving everyone the appearance of communicating via telepathy. 

Roaming the explorable police station between missions or open hubs such as downtown leads to side missions that place RoboCop in bizarre, entertaining scenarios with Detroit’s finest weirdos. Whether solving a murder on a sunscreen commercial set, clearing boombox-blasting hooligans away from a storefront, or doing the “Robot Dance” at the request of a child, you could tell me these tasks are just thinly veiled vehicles for RoboCop to deliver delightfully dopey one-liners, and I would be okay with that. Rogue City doesn’t take itself totally seriously, capturing the first film's dark satire and the sequels' campy goofiness that, while not always hitting the mark, manage to work in a fun way. 

Choice-driven dialogue presents opportunities to present yourself as a strict