Robocop Rogue City (Xbox Series X)

I was very concerned with the Robocop Rogue City announcement when it first dropped 2 years ago, as much as I enjoyed Terminator Resistance, would a similar formula transfer over to my beloved Robocop? After a what feels like a speedy 2 years we finally have Robocop Rogue City. I might cry if it’s no good.

Rogue City is set after the events of Robocop 2 and before the forgettable Robocop 3, the old man is still in charge of OCP, Nuke’s still on the streets, and no sign of hacked ED-209 barking like a puppy or the Splatterpunks. Robocop has some additional light shed on him due to him glitching at the scene of a crime, and has a monitoring chip implanted. At the same time a new threat in Detroit by the name of “The New Guy” is troubling Detroit and as always Robocop needs to be on hand to serve.

Robocop Rogue City has a bit of everything in regards to a modern shooter, there’s narrative choices, a few hub areas, and obviously many areas to shoot many many areas. Most missions will start you in the police station where you’ll be able to catch up with most of the additional cast. Fans of the series will see a good selection of returning characters from the first 2 movies, in the police station, Reid, Lewis and even Cecil who’s a tiny tiny character in Robocop 1 is there. Lewis obviously being a main character has a decent amount going on in the story, and Reid will give you a fair bit of story leading into missions.

Most hub areas in the game will have a good selection of missions and sub missions in them, and being a serving police officer you can even solve petty small crime like issuing tickets or taking people to the drunk tank, these are simple, but will help you get some additional XP to upgrade yourself a bit more. Maybe they’re a bit more throwaway than they could be, but they help pad out the game somewhat and they make the world feel more lived in.

Once you get into the main missions you’ll end up in hyper violent gun fights. The gunplay in Robocop is fantastic, you start with Robocop’s trusty Auto 9, a modified Beretta 93R, a burst fire pistol possible of turning most foes into mush, and in Rogue City you’ll be turning a lot of people into mush. Other weapons are available, but apart from a few more explosive options, I found myself returning back to the Auto 9, which like the film Robocop has throughout the majority of the time.

You also have a few perks which don’t appear in the movies, a flashbang which will stun the enemies, a decent dash to get you out of sticky situations, a shield, and a slow-motion which is with you from the start. All of these are upgradable, and there’s a lot more to upgrade too.

Graphically everything is good, it looks very standard for UE5, character models look ok, though they definitely could have been a bit better, and standard NPC’s usually have a few similar looks. This goes for most of the games enemies too, each gang/enemy you’ll battle will stick to a few similar styles, like the Biker gang, and the Punks (no NOT the Spl atterpunks). Most models look criminally similar in one of the few negative points of the game. However, Robocop looks great, even when unmasked, further more other droids you’ll meet in the game look incredible. I can’t describe how happy I genuinely was when I saw a particular famous droid from the franchise for the first time.

Levels look decent with some really nice visual mechanics, glass shatters, walls explode, computers fry when thrown, everything feels full of life here. Though it’s got a bit of that Teyon jank, it doesn’t feel out of place, and the amount of love they’ve shown here with the levels. You’ll see many familiar places from the first movie, so those fans will recognise so much, with typical easter eggs, which I won’t divulge here but are all perfect. A real dream to see them digitally recreated almost perfectly to how you’ve seen them before.

Robocop for me was an almost perfect experience, hopefully Teyon continue to support this with dlc and additional content, nothing has been mentioned as this review has been written. However Nacon said they were pleasantly surprised with sales of Robocop, and hopefully will see devs add more to the universe, Terminator got much love so why not?