Robocop: Rogue City

In 2019, Teyon brought us Terminator: Resistance, which set the new standard for what a movie-licensed game could achieve. With Robocop: Rogue City – a love letter to the first two Robocop films’ dystopian vision of future Detroit, they’ve done it once again.  

When the developers transformed the world of the film into a virtual space for players to explore, no detail, no matter how small, was missed. The story picks up where Robocop 2 left off. Omni Consumer Products (OCP) has successfully shed the blame for the failed “Robocop 2” cyborg going rogue, and they’re just as determined as ever to replace the decrepit Old Detroit with the corporate-run Delta City.  

They also still have an outsized influence on the Detroit Police Department and control of Robocop himself.  In the opening mission, a local gang attempts to get the attention of a new bad guy, creatively called “The New Guy,” by hijacking a local TV station and taking hostages. 

At the culmination of the hostage rescue, Robocop experiences a memory that causes him to hesitate, requiring his partner, Detective Anne Lewis, to step in.  As a result of this “defect,” Robocop is fitted with a new chip that will monitor and try to prevent these “glitches” from happening. If they can’t be stopped, OCP has promised to shut him down for good.

In this first-person shooter, players take on the role of the titular cyborg, Robocop, as he investigates this new threat to Detroit and tries to understand the nature of the “glitches” that are causing him to lose control. To do this, players will have to shoot and punch the hell out of a lot of bad guys and leave a gory mess of broken bodies in their wake. While combat makes up the bulk of the gameplay, players will also need to participate in other police work, such as investigating crime scenes, issuing citations, and even rescuing a cat. 

Nostalgia Factor 9

Several locations from the films have been lovingly transformed from a series of disconnected sets into three-dimensional spaces for players to navigate. For example, the police station lobby, locker rooms, lockup, gun range, and garage all have real locality now.  

For fans of the films, it’s like a non-stop easter egg hunt.  Robocop works in some of his most popular lines from the films, but they’re incorporated, so naturally, it doesn’t come across as hamfisted. If you’re familiar with Robocop 2 (1990), it’s hard not to snicker as you hear him quote cheesy aphorisms when he issues citations.  Everything’s here, from the 1986 Ford Taurus police cars to the “really $h!tty gas mileage” SUX 5000, from Robcop’s Auto 9 pistol to the Cobra Assault Cannon.  Ever fantasized about going up against an ED-209? Now’schance.    

Seeing Is Believing

Nearly every conceivable step was taken to recreate the atmosphere of the films. The set lighting and the lens filters are enough by themselves to convince you you’re in that world, but the developers went all out. 

For example, when the player switches to Robocop’s scanning mode, they’re treated to a near-perfect re-creation of the first-person sequences from the films, down to the artificial scanlines which slightly darken the screen and the crosshair boxes that form around targets as the computer recognizes them.  Even the streets of Old Detroit are filled with rain-glistening concrete and puddles that reflect the street lights. They’re strewn with litter and garbage that has convincingly collected in the corners and around fences.

In action, the re-creation is just as stunning. When you fire the Auto 9, its muzzle flash flares out in an X-shape. The impact of bullets hitting a soft target is just as wildly exaggerated as the overdone squibs from the films, as is the blood spray and gore that erupts as three-burst rounds chew through a body.

Standing Your Ground – Gameplay

Robocop is a bullet sponge. He doesn’t crouch, he doesn’t have a dodge mechanic (well, not really),  And, while not invincible, he can take quite a lot of punishment before going down. This encourages players to stand their ground and rely on targeting and quickly taking out threats rather than zipping from cover to cover to survive an encounter. As a result, battles feel slower-paced and more contemplative than many other FPS games. 

The controls felt tight and responsive. For the most part, the aim assist worked well and was nearly transparent to the experience. However, it does have the tendency to work against the player at times. This is most evident in situations where an enemy is standing next to something explosive. If you try to move the reticle over the explosive, you’ll feel the aim assist fighting with you to keep your weapon pointed at the enemy.

Do You Hear What I Hear?

Just as much care was put into the audible as the visible when creating this experience. Every little whirr and whine of a servo motor has been re-created, along with the unique sounds of each weapon being fired and the impact of its bullets. Perhaps the most delightful sound is the simple “thuck” of Robocop’s footsteps. 

Musically, the soundtrack is brilliant. Most of it is original and fits the action beautifully. While they did license the original theme, they showed restraint when using it, which made it all the more impactful. It’s only heard in a subdued piano rendition that plays over the title screen and in full during a climactic battle at the end. This was masterfully done. 

The game takes full advantage of multi-channel surround sound to create an atmosphere with constant low-level noise and effects. Character voices properly pan around according to the camera orientation.

Progress Not Perfection

Each action, whether it’s blasting a gang member, finding bits of contraband, or issuing a ticket for parking in front of a hydrant, earns players experience points, which can be spent on improving various attributes like armor or engineering. As these attributes are leveled up, there are also special abilities granted, such as being able to open a safe without finding the combination or revealing the locations of hidden items on the map. This fairly basic mode of progression gives the player a little control over things without turning them into chores.  

Players will also have the ability to upgrade the Auto 9 pistol using “motherboards” salvaged from bosses and found in R&D labs. It’s not just about increasing damage or reload speed either – you can also get full automatic fire and armor piercing, and for no reason other than the fun of it, you can increase the amount of gore shown when you blow away a bad guy.

The balance of progression is so well done it’s hard to overstate. With many games, it’s easy to peak early and take all of the challenge out of the game or peak late and give you awesome abilities you can only use once or twice before the end. Here, it felt like you were able to make Robocop into an unstoppable juggernaut at just the right point that you were able to maximally enjoy it.

Glitching Isn’t Just For Robocop

It’s, perhaps, ironic that Robocop glitching is part of the story’s main plot because this game has its share of trouble with stability. The PS5 version has nearly constant visual artifacts and other issues. The PC version, which this review is primarily based on, fares a little better in that these issues are a bit more sparse. The way telephone cords are rendered is so hilariously bad it’s hard to tell if the rendering is bugged or the developers just ran out of enthusiasm. Most of these problems are benign and only occasionally distract from the action, but there is one progression-breaking bug where an NPC gets stuck in a floor if you approach the objectives in the wrong order. Our playthrough required reloading an earlier save that lost about an hour of progress. 

Story: How It Started

It’s important to put the source material in perspective to understand what Teyon has done here. So let’s start with Robocop (1987), the film. Robocop’s veneer of ultra-violent action was so flashy that it nearly drowned out the themes that were really at its heart.  For all of its gore, it was also a cynical admonition of corporate greed, capitalist excesses, and the dangers of corporate lobbying, along with an existential examination of what it is to be human. 

Released during the Reagan years, when the US had emerged from an economic slump very reminiscent of the one we’re experiencing here in the early 2020s, Robocop’s writers were obviously trying to be critical of American Exceptionalism by taking some of the liberal bugbears of the day and extrapolating them to the level of ridiculousness. Good examples of these are the film’s fake commercials for cars with intentionally bad fuel economy and sunblock that will definitely give you cancer with repeated use but is the only thing to protect you against the sun now that the ozone layer is gone. 

These criticisms were so unrealistic that they became comical and ironically resonated with many of the people the writers were trying to lampoon. Instead of a poignant morality tale, its anti-capitalist message became a parody enjoyed by capitalists the world round. As for the existential question of whether Robocop is still human, the emphasis on ultra-violent action sequences left only enough screen time to examine it in the shallowest of terms.

Story: How It’s Going

Teyon has succeeded at something very difficult with Robocop: Rogue City in that they have managed to faithfully re-create the film experience while still telling an original story that fits in perfectly with the themes of the first two films. The surface story is still that of a dystopian world of greedy men wielding the power of their wealth and corporations to play God. The cynical parodies of capitalist excesses have barely changed. This is to say that the writers stuck with the elements from the films without trying to legitimize them as serious criticism. There’s even a mission about Sunblock 5000, which is all the more hilarious, considering we all know the panic about losing the ozone layer was silly. 

Where the story really shines is in the additional time the writers were able to devote to the existential question that Robocop faces about whether he is still Alex Murphy and whether he is still human. Rather than just telling you the answer, you’ll be asked to discover it for yourself – your responses will determine the outcome.

While the game offers you choices that have some impact on which epilogue scenes you’ll see, there are no branching paths or major divergences that would make a compelling case to keep playing after the credits roll for the first time. A low replayability score is not necessarily a negative in this case, as the game gives you ample opportunity to see and do everything in a single play-through.

Final Thoughts

Robocop: Rogue City is an excellent example of what time and passion can do for a video game. It’s a well-known stigma in the industry that movie-licensed games are generally crap, but this game defies that trend in all of the best ways. With tight shooter controls, a good variety of gameplay types, and a quality story that respects the source material and brings it to life, this game is a must-play for fans of the genre and fans of the films alike, and we are thrilled to mark it as Worth it.

Woke Elements

It may be a bit controversial, but I’m going with “none” on this one. While there are definitely some anti-capitalist themes, they are hilariously disingenuous to the point where I believe they were genuinely intended as the parody they ultimately are, and much more so than in the original 1987 film. If the writers were trying to sneak woke elements into Robocop: Rogue City, I expect they would have tried to introduce more relevant criticisms instead of carrying forward with the ones that were already there in the twenty-six-year-old source material.

When the original film was released, Detective Ann Lewis’s depiction of a tough female cop was somewhat novel. Despite that, the character did not exhibit the woke character traits of being masculine, being the physical equal of a man, or being a lady boss. If the writers had wanted to make this story woke, they would have had to change those things, but they did not. In Rogue City, Ann Lewis is still a tough cop and commands the respect of everyone in the precinct, but she is still ultimately feminine and doesn’t have to be built up by tearing down the men around her.

Finally, I appreciate this game’s acknowledgment of Christianity. Many games about the future of the United States either pretend that Christianity never existed or stand up some thinly disguised surrogate for Christianity at which to lob one-sided criticisms. Rogue City doesn’t have a religious aspect, but there were three things it did to acknowledge Christianity indirectly. Firstly, there’s a mission where you’re asked to find a VHS tape in a rental store, and the clue you’re given is that the title has something to do with The Bible. The character who gives this clue does so matter-of-factly, as though he expects everyone to have a general working knowledge of biblical phrases.  Secondly, during a prison riot, as you’re walking through empty rooms on the way to your destination, there’s a leather-bound Holy Bible sitting on one of the counters by itself. No context is offered. It’s not next to the Quran or other religious symbols. It’s not sitting next to a pile of drugs. It’s just simply there, acknowledging that it exists. And lastly, when the characters say “God,” the subtitles properly capitalize the proper noun. This doesn’t mean the writers are Christians or even theists, but it does mean that they didn’t intentionally use bad grammar just to be derisive.

The post Robocop: Rogue City first appeared on Worth it or Woke.

Platform Reviewed:

PC

Build:

NVidia RTX 3090 Founder’s Edition (not overclocked)

32 GB DDR3 2666

Intel Core i7 4.4 GHz

Windows 10 22H2

Samsung EVO 970 SSD

XBOX One Wired Gamepad

The Good:

• Tight FPS controls
• Fresh UI (not just re-skinned Fallout)
• Multiple play styles (explore everything, just chase the dot, bit of both)
• Clever hybrid progression system
• Boost packs!
• Space combat is simple but well-implemented

The Bad:

• Still crashes whether you need it or not like every other Bethesda game
• Shipbuilder is clunky and poorly documented
• Gets boring traversing empty landscapes
• Missions get super repetitive towards the end

The Ugly:

• Suffers from a mild infection of the “Woke Mind Virus.”

Starfield

Mysterious artifacts are being discovered all over the known systems. They bend gravity and distort space, and for you, the player, they impart unintelligible visions, but their true nature and purpose are unknown. However, when brought together, they respond to one another like pieces of a whole. As you search for the artifacts, you’ll encounter exotic landscapes and hostile alien wildlife, navigate asteroid fields, and political intrigue with equal peril. You’ll shoot, talk, or sneak your way in and out of danger until the assembled artifacts bring you face-to-face with the ultimate decision not just about your own fate but the fate of mankind itself in this expansive star-faring adventure.

Starfield is an open-world first-person shooter (FPS) and role-playing game (RPG) set in a post-Earth future where mankind has spread to the stars and brought all his faults and virtues along for the ride. Player choice takes center stage in this epic galaxy-spanning adventure, where players will create their own custom avatar, buy, build, and modify their own spaceships, build their own settlements, and forge their own way across hundreds of planets on the ground in zero gravity and in space according to their own play style. Players will have to decide between combat, diplomacy, deception, or stealth as they navigate the epic narrative toward its galactic conclusion.

A Fresh Coat of Paint

The first thing that stands out is the new user interface (UI). While it has some similarities to the Elder Scrolls and Fallout UI, it feels very fresh. The circular display in the lower left shows health, O2, and local gravity (as well as adverse conditions, if there are any). Stamina is now displayed as O2, and it depletes if you sprint or try to run while carrying too much mass. This is, of course, affected by gravity in a somewhat intuitive way, but it opens up more player choice than simply making it so you can’t run if you’re over-encumbered.

The first-person shooter controls are very well implemented – the best I’ve ever seen from Bethesda. They’re tight and snappy and give you a sense of accuracy that was definitely lacking in Bethesda’s prior efforts.

Starfield’s skill progression is a pretty clever hybrid of the “do it to learn it” and the “spend skill points to learn it.” You spend skill points to unlock a skill and additional skill points to upgrade the skill, but in between each level, you have to complete a challenge before you’re allowed to upgrade. For example, to get from “Pistols 1” to “Pistols 2” you have to kill 10 enemies with a pistol.

The skill system seems designed for specialization, as there were only enough earnable points to unlock about 12% of the skills on the first play-through.

Eventually, you’ll gain the ability to build a settlement – which is a sort of home base you can use to store things and create a custom set of facilities. This is an optional activity – the game never requires you to build one. If Minecraft, Factorio, and other “builder” games appeal to you, settlement building can be a great diversion from questing.

Getting Around

In one of Bethesda’s more novel decisions, gravity plays a large part in how you’re able to explore. Go somewhere with low gravity, and you can suddenly jump ten feet in the air. Travel to somewhere with high gravity, and your character can barely get off the ground. Boost packs, a kind of power-assisted jump, also open up a lot of vertical possibilities – everything from restoring your ability to jump in high gravity to nearly being able to fly in low gravity.

The world of Starfield is pretty large – there are hundreds of planets orbiting 120 stars and a lot of ways to get around. Once you’ve visited a place, you can usually fast-travel back to it, and you can fast-travel from nearly anywhere. However, getting there the first time can sometimes feel more like a chore than an adventure. Overland, you’re often traversing almost completely empty landscapes for 10-20 minutes at a time. Additionally, Interstellar travel can be almost as bad. You’re often forced to stop off at unexplored star systems on your way somewhere else. Sometimes you get attacked or sucked into a side quest when you go to these places, but just as often, there’s nothing really there, and it’s just a waste of time.

Space is the Place

The spaceship combat controls are straightforward and intuitive. There’s an element of strategy to transferring power between systems – do you want to risk weaker shields so your lasers can do more damage? 

You can upgrade and customize your ships, but it feels like a half-baked experience. For example, nearly every ship comes pre-installed with weapons and reactors that are superior to anything the vendors had to sell. The ship-building interface is about as intuitive as AutoCAD, and for some reason, there is no tutorial explaining how exactly to use it. 

There’s a point in the game where the player is forced to use the shipbuilder to attach some new components to a ship, but the game does nothing to explain how. Of course, the Internet is your friend in this situation, but it’s still a glaring oversight in the design.

Black, White, and Gray

There’s a pirates vs. navy faction questline that defines the whole Starfield experience. It offers mystery, intrigue, exploration, danger, and a huge payoff. However, where it truly shines is the tricky choice at the end. Moral conundrums are a staple of Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls and Fallout titles. In the first games, players had to choose from ideologically disparate factions. It wasn’t a matter of which faction was the most good or the most evil that made the choices hard; that part was obvious. What made the choice hard was whether you wanted your character to be good or evil.

With each successive game in those series, the writers messed with that formula by populating opposite factions with equally awful people. By Fallout 4, every faction was evil in some way. By contrast, the factions in Starfield are morally distinct. For instance, the pirates aren’t misunderstood heroes fighting for freedom, and the navy isn’t a group of secretly corrupt warmongers; you know exactly which side you’re choosing when you make the choice. This is a much-needed return to form for anyone sick of being asked to choose between the proverbial turd sandwich and giant douche.

The Bethesda CTD Shuffle

An RTX 3090 should have had zero difficulty running this game in 1080p without HDR, but there are still areas of the game where performance visibly bogs. Crash to desktop (CTD) frequency was about what we’ve come to expect from Bethesda – about 15 to 20 times during about a 40-hour playthrough. The only other major performance issue or bug encountered was that multiple lines of dialogue or other audio would run concurrently – sometimes, it was impossible to make out the one you were supposed to be listening to.

In Summary

The main plot of the game is imaginative, if a little predictable. Without offering any spoilers, the most noteworthy aspect of it is the way they managed to incorporate the concept of “New Game+” into the central narrative. 

There’s a spark of discovery that hasn’t been evident since Oblivion, where you notice something as you walk past on your way to the next part of your mission and think, “Hey, what’s that?” and two hours later, you’ve had so much fun exploring you’ve almost forgotten about your original mission. You can “just follow the dot” if that’s all you want, or you can dive in and get lost in an enormous game world.

Starfield is a worthy addition to the Bethesda family of celebrated first-person RPGs and manages to simultaneously represent a return to form and something fresh. It’s hard to wholeheartedly recommend it because of the woke elements, but it’s undeniably a good time.

WOKE ELEMENTS

While the woke elements in Starfield initially got a lot of press, they are not terribly distracting, and you can play a good portion of the game without them being thrown in your face or reinforced.

Trans Agenda:

• Character creation is 99% typical fare, with the exception that there’s now a non-optional pronoun selection requirement. You are forced to select preferred pronouns in order to continue, which includes the choices “he/him, she/her, ” and ” they/them.” No “zey/zim” or “clown/clownself” silliness, thankfully – at least not as of the release version. The game will no longer use female pronouns for your female avatar without being explicitly told to do so. As seldom as this actually comes up in the game’s dialogue, it would have been just as easy to never use pronouns to refer to the player character at all. Although subtle, this is absolutely an intentional encroachment against players who will not answer that question in real life because of the matter of conscience that it represents. 
• While this is more of a comment about the community than the game, it bears mentioning that when a modder attempted to provide players the ability to skip this dialogue question, there was immediate vitriolic backlash. Nexus Mods instantly de-listed the mod, and the gaming press spent several subsequent days tripping over themselves trying to outdo each other with virtue-signaling declarations that anger and hatred were self-evident in the mere desire not to be forced to select pronouns and that such a desire was objectively bigoted. Perhaps Google just hid all of the contrary opinions, but there were no apparent publications or platforms that considered the possibility that not wanting to promote egregious self-harm and the destruction of women’s private spaces also comes from a place of compassion for fellow humans.

Gay Agenda:

• Companions, which are non-player characters (NPCs) that fight alongside you, are largely optional but required for certain parts of the game. Some companions have romance options as you establish a relationship with them. Unfortunately, this isn’t like Total Recall, where they only ask you once what your sexual preference is. The game will repeatedly offer up same-sex romance options if your companion is the same gender as your player character. In one playthrough as a male character, the main male companion dialogue offered roughly five times as many opportunities to “[Flirt]” compared with that of the main female companion. If Bethesda really added a pronoun option for the purpose of supporting player choice, they should also add a choice that disables non-preferred romance options.
• Romantic relationships make up only a small part of the game’s story threads, but the ratio of homosexual to heterosexual relationships between NPCs is about 3:2, and the heterosexual relationships are all defined by some sort of toxicity.

Anti-Capitalism:

• Giving specific examples would involve spoilers, but suffice it to say that when the game explores the subject of capitalism, every executive business leader is painted as a greedy, unempathetic, murderous sociopath who lacks self-awareness. At least when Outer Worlds did this, it was tongue-in-cheek. Here, it’s as though the writers take it for gospel that that’s what every large business is actually like.

The post StarField first appeared on Worth it or Woke.