The death of AA games has been (slightly) exaggerated. The folks at Teyon, makers of those Heavy Fire games you see littering the shelves at GameStop and that godawful Rambo game from 2014, have followed up their surprisingly good 2019 effort Terminator: Resistance with another surprisingly good FPS adaptation of a different 80’s sci-fi action film franchise.
Rogue City was clearly made with a lot of love of respect for the original and sticks close to its vision of a comically over the top retro-future dystopia. You can arrest a guy who will thank you for it because it means he gets guaranteed food and shelter. You can find memos from OCP, the evil megacorp that created Robocop, telling employees not to kill themselves because it will create more work for their coworkers. Early in the game there’s a quest concerning the filming of a TV commercial for a sunscreen so toxic that they have to have a stunt double put it on. It all feels like stuff that would be right at home in the original film.
While Rogue City does spend some time examining the tragedy of Robocop and his struggle to reconcile his past life with the not-quite human not-quite machine affront to nature he is now, its primary objective is to sell the fantasy of being Robocop, and it pulls that off in spades. Walking through fire, bullets bouncing off your armored body as you lay waste to legions of gangsters is never gets old, and Robocop has this ridiculous grab that can pick up objects from several feet away. Pick up explosive barrels and chuck them at crowds, snatch enemies off their motorcycles while they’re riding them and chuck them at other enemies and then throw the motorcycle at them too for good measure, the hundredth time you do it is just as fun as the first.
There’s a wide variety of weapons to use but you’ll start each chapter equipped with only one: Robocop’s iconic Auto-9 pistol (with unlimited ammo) and you’ll rarely need to use any other weapon. The Auto-9 has several motherboards you can find and freely switch between that each offer different boosts to its base stats and upgrades like explosive rounds, additional firing mode, and piercing bullets. I spent the latter half of the game rocking a full-auto with bottomless mags and max damage and accuracy, and it was like I was ED-209, and the enemies were that unfortunate OCP executive.
Speaking of ED-209, this game features 4 boss fights and all of them are lame. 3 of these boss fights are against 3 separate ED-209s, and they all boil down to “pummel its weak spot until it dies”, preferably doing so while standing in a sweet spot where you barely have to move to avoid its shots. The game is also a bit rough performance-wise. I noticed frequent texture pop-in and crackly, de-synced audio. During the final stretch of the last boss fight I suddenly lost the ability to aim, forcing me to reload the checkpoint which was all the way at the beginning of the fight.
Teyon has had quite the developer glow-up in recent years. This studio has spent most of its existence pushing out the kind of generic shovelware you see filling the bargain bins at Walmart or polluting GameStop shelves, but it seems they’ve really found their bag now, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t kind of excited to see what they might do next.
Rogue City was clearly made with a lot of love of respect for the original and sticks close to its vision of a comically over the top retro-future dystopia. You can arrest a guy who will thank you for it because it means he gets guaranteed food and shelter. You can find memos from OCP, the evil megacorp that created Robocop, telling employees not to kill themselves because it will create more work for their coworkers. Early in the game there’s a quest concerning the filming of a TV commercial for a sunscreen so toxic that they have to have a stunt double put it on. It all feels like stuff that would be right at home in the original film.
While Rogue City does spend some time examining the tragedy of Robocop and his struggle to reconcile his past life with the not-quite human not-quite machine affront to nature he is now, its primary objective is to sell the fantasy of being Robocop, and it pulls that off in spades. Walking through fire, bullets bouncing off your armored body as you lay waste to legions of gangsters is never gets old, and Robocop has this ridiculous grab that can pick up objects from several feet away. Pick up explosive barrels and chuck them at crowds, snatch enemies off their motorcycles while they’re riding them and chuck them at other enemies and then throw the motorcycle at them too for good measure, the hundredth time you do it is just as fun as the first.
There’s a wide variety of weapons to use but you’ll start each chapter equipped with only one: Robocop’s iconic Auto-9 pistol (with unlimited ammo) and you’ll rarely need to use any other weapon. The Auto-9 has several motherboards you can find and freely switch between that each offer different boosts to its base stats and upgrades like explosive rounds, additional firing mode, and piercing bullets. I spent the latter half of the game rocking a full-auto with bottomless mags and max damage and accuracy, and it was like I was ED-209, and the enemies were that unfortunate OCP executive.
Speaking of ED-209, this game features 4 boss fights and all of them are lame. 3 of these boss fights are against 3 separate ED-209s, and they all boil down to “pummel its weak spot until it dies”, preferably doing so while standing in a sweet spot where you barely have to move to avoid its shots. The game is also a bit rough performance-wise. I noticed frequent texture pop-in and crackly, de-synced audio. During the final stretch of the last boss fight I suddenly lost the ability to aim, forcing me to reload the checkpoint which was all the way at the beginning of the fight.
Teyon has had quite the developer glow-up in recent years. This studio has spent most of its existence pushing out the kind of generic shovelware you see filling the bargain bins at Walmart or polluting GameStop shelves, but it seems they’ve really found their bag now, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t kind of excited to see what they might do next.