RoboCop: Rogue City

This is the best Robocop game ever released! Being a fan of the original Robocop arcade, and all the ports and sequels that followed over the years, this is without doubt the best!

I haven't played a Robocop game since the arcade version, but this had a decent premise - a follow on to the first two fillms. It turns out this is an enjoyable game in pacing, length and entertainment value. Everything you'd expect from a game, even if the story was a little predictable - but that was also in line with the movies. And why not? Voice acting is on the money, so if you're expecting Robocop and the Detroit Police department trying to maintain a sense of justice in the tacky, social gulf ridden mess that was the self-indulgent 80s, that's exactly what you get. It's not exactly a tough game, and I'm partly glad - there's a better sense of immersion when you're meant to be a crime-fighting cyborg in an alternate past. Hats off to the rest of the force but especially officer Lewis - not a hint of titanium, but every bit as dedicated to justice as the titular hero.

Good game. Good story. Good gameplay loop. You really "feel like" Robocop: massive, armored cyborg with an awesom gun. Worth playing.

The game is a beautiful love letter to the 80s that is absolutely crippled by the developer just making bizarrely foolish design decisions. A perfect example of this: You cannot manually save, and the auto-save is often EXTREMELY RARE. I'll go half an hour and it hasn't saved. I'll go through a story section, explore an entire area, and have to leave to do other things. When I come back I'm forced to redo it all over again. WHY? Why would they do this? Another one: You have a "Scanning Mode" that zooms in a bit and adds these horrible scanlines over the screen, but you'll need to use this near constantly in order to not miss things, so prepare for maximal eyestrain. If they're going to force the user to turn it on all the time anyway, why make it so awful?

I have crashed at least once every chapter and whenever more than one object exploded at the same time. That said, this game absolutely has the feel of the Robocop movies embedded in it. The graphics and mechanics really lend itself to the power fantasy of the origional robocop movies. Above this, a great amount of world building with the feel of how robocop would actually patrol the mean streets of Detroit with tacky one-liners and a near emotionless application of the law in every situation, mundane or action packed. This is one of those games that is absolutely great when it works, but unfortuneately it doesn't work that well.