Robocop is my hero. Yes the film is a satirical screed against capitalism, the value it places on human life and the idea that if you’re deemed profitable then not even death is an escape, but it’s also an awesome, gory action film about a cyborg cop blowing away scumbags and regaining his humanity. It’s one of my three favourite films and very dear to me, so when they announced this, a videogame that seemed to tackle the subject matter in a way that acknowledged its multitudes, I was obviously excited.
Set after the events of Robocop 2 (which is also great), Detroit is beset by a shadowy crime lord known only as “The new guy in town”. Local gangs are causing trouble to prove themselves worthy of his vast funds and to complicate matters, Robocop is experiencing glitches that stop him in his tracks and bombard him with nightmare hallucinations of his wife and son. The game places great focus on who Robocop is as a person and how he interacts with people, contrasting the more mundane parts of his job with all the exciting gun fights. OCP assigns him a therapist, and through his conversations with her Robo can express the belief that he is human and that his face beneath the helmet is how he sees himself, or that he’s a soulless machine with no connection to Alex Murphy. Most locations have a variety of side missions that involve talking to the locals and often choosing whether to stick rigidly to the letter of the law to their detriment, or throw them a bone, bend the rules and help them out. This is reflected in Murphy’s prime directives; he can uphold the law, or he can serve the public trust. Among others there’s a drug addicted police informer desperate to do right by the family of a cop who looked after him, a journalist aiming to take down OCP and a rookie cop hired to keep tabs on you by OCP who you can either ignore and badmouth to your co-workers or nurture and train into a competent police officer. It feels rich and rewarding to develop these relationships as Murphy over the course of the game, directed by what he believes and how he views the world. Just like the films, the game realises that Alex Murphy as a character is three dimensional and ripe for exploration, that his thoughts, feelings and interactions are just as important as him fighting crime.
The game also realises that you want to blow scumbags into dog food with the Auto-9, and so made doing so feel fantastic. Murphy moves quite slowly but he feels big and powerful; your melee attack is a massive punch that sends people flying. A variety of guns can be equipped in your one alternate weapon slot, with the other reserved for the Auto-9, which can be upgraded to not only improve its stats but also swap in modifications, things like spread rounds, armour piercing and removing the need to reload so you can shoot indefinitely. How good the Auto-9 feels to use is make or break for the combat, and they nailed it; it sounds right, it looks right, it feels powerful and blows off heads and limbs. The other guns vary in how good they feel, with SMGs and the standard pistol feeling weak and underwhelming while shotguns, assault rifles and heavy machine guns feeling better. They’re largely superfluous until the end of the game, when robot enemies and armoured humans take over from squishy street punks. Pleasingly, taking a leaf out of film Murphy’s book and shooting people in the crotch is an effective tactic. There are also light RPG elements, though unfortunately they don’t come up very often. Your stats include the obvious health, armour and weapon damage but also psychology, engineering and investigation; early on I lacked the stats to work out a safe code without finding it, or interact with a junction box to open a locked door. These instances quickly dried up, and none of them are required to progress anyway. It’s less immersive sim or choosing a character build, more a change to get a bit of extra XP or feel like you’re interacting with the environment in a unique way. Finally there are physical skills tied to your stats; a couple of them are useful; super armour for a short time and a quick, massive forward dodge. One of them, an electrical discharge, I barely used and the ability to slow down time is largely useless, especially when using the burst fire Auto-9. These skills and the light RPG elements feel like a nice addition that are ultimately unnecessary to the gameplay at large, but they don’t take anything away.
Robocop Rogue City gave me exactly what I wanted from a Rocobop game: I felt like Alex Murphy in everything I did. Whether walking around the streets of Detroit giving people parking tickets, helping people in need, turning a blind eye to people down on their luck involved in crime for relatable reasons, asserting my humanity and disdain for OCP and stomping through a building as the main theme kicks in and I start blowing scumbags away with the Auto-9, I felt like Robocop. I felt like Robocop, and I loved every second of it. I needed this game to be good, and it did not disappoint.
By James Lambert
@jameslambert18
The Reviewing Floor 