Review for the Demo Version of the Game
So I played about an hour of this... and I gotta say I'm not at all impressed by a single aspect. It's less than a month out from release, and if the end product is anything like it is now then uhhhhh… this isn't going to be reviewed well.
Let's start off with what it gets right: Peter Weller. This man is awesome. Hearing his voice again took me back to when I was a kid watching the original movie for the first time; he's as great as he ever was. Second, I think the game looks good—visually, albeit with a lot of bugs that I hope get ironed out on launch, especially the god awful blurriness on reflections when DLSS is enabled. I also think it does a good job at recreating these incredibly iconic locations that every Robocop fan knows; the streets of a dimly lit Detroit, with neon signs perpetuating through every road—every building, its massive skyscrapers comprised of generic offices—and of course, breakable windows that you can throw goons out of. It’s also appropriately gory. It screams Robocop, at least in a couple of ways. But I think that’s where the positives end.
The game is a stutter fest, you can’t go 30 seconds without missing frames at least a couple of times. I wouldn’t exactly call it unplayable, but I certainly wouldn’t call it playable either… it’s somewhere in the middle. The core issue is that the game is just, really, really empty? It plays more like a tech demo than something that the average person can just open up and have fun with. The gameplay is monotonous, with side-objectives that are straight out of an average Ubisoft game, but dare I say Ubisoft has always managed to make those tedious objectives at least a little bit fun? Here it’s: talk to this person, give him a ticket, objective ends. It’s just not fun, and the fact that I got bored after an hour says a lot about the quality of those missions. The main story isn’t much better judging by the first hour. It's shooting room after shooting room—and hey, that’s Robocop! I get it, it's cool! But I can already tell that these gameplay systems aren’t deep whatsoever, they’re going to get boring very quickly—at least for me. There’s also the usual array of upgrades that you can purchase with skill points; I got some sort of dash in my playthrough, and it was very underwhelming. But back to the point of the game feeling empty, there’s almost no music in here… the iconic theme plays while you’re mowing down goons, but when you’re roaming the streets—it's pure silence, or walking through the police department—all you can hear are the very stock-sounding keyboards, phone rings, etc. It feels so incredibly cheap, and why does a game about Robocop feel cheap? This character deserves more than that; and I obviously know that the budget limitations aren’t on the devs, but the fact that nobody can greenlit a AAA Robocop game is beyond me. Even the facial animations are horrid, they can’t deliver any sort of emotion, and the mediocre voice acting doesn’t help. I can’t really judge the story by how much of it I saw, but it seems like it could lead somewhere interesting, somewhere with a lot of heart—so there’s that; but yeah, this is going to be a miss for me.
So I played about an hour of this... and I gotta say I'm not at all impressed by a single aspect. It's less than a month out from release, and if the end product is anything like it is now then uhhhhh… this isn't going to be reviewed well.
Let's start off with what it gets right: Peter Weller. This man is awesome. Hearing his voice again took me back to when I was a kid watching the original movie for the first time; he's as great as he ever was. Second, I think the game looks good—visually, albeit with a lot of bugs that I hope get ironed out on launch, especially the god awful blurriness on reflections when DLSS is enabled. I also think it does a good job at recreating these incredibly iconic locations that every Robocop fan knows; the streets of a dimly lit Detroit, with neon signs perpetuating through every road—every building, its massive skyscrapers comprised of generic offices—and of course, breakable windows that you can throw goons out of. It’s also appropriately gory. It screams Robocop, at least in a couple of ways. But I think that’s where the positives end.
The game is a stutter fest, you can’t go 30 seconds without missing frames at least a couple of times. I wouldn’t exactly call it unplayable, but I certainly wouldn’t call it playable either… it’s somewhere in the middle. The core issue is that the game is just, really, really empty? It plays more like a tech demo than something that the average person can just open up and have fun with. The gameplay is monotonous, with side-objectives that are straight out of an average Ubisoft game, but dare I say Ubisoft has always managed to make those tedious objectives at least a little bit fun? Here it’s: talk to this person, give him a ticket, objective ends. It’s just not fun, and the fact that I got bored after an hour says a lot about the quality of those missions. The main story isn’t much better judging by the first hour. It's shooting room after shooting room—and hey, that’s Robocop! I get it, it's cool! But I can already tell that these gameplay systems aren’t deep whatsoever, they’re going to get boring very quickly—at least for me. There’s also the usual array of upgrades that you can purchase with skill points; I got some sort of dash in my playthrough, and it was very underwhelming. But back to the point of the game feeling empty, there’s almost no music in here… the iconic theme plays while you’re mowing down goons, but when you’re roaming the streets—it's pure silence, or walking through the police department—all you can hear are the very stock-sounding keyboards, phone rings, etc. It feels so incredibly cheap, and why does a game about Robocop feel cheap? This character deserves more than that; and I obviously know that the budget limitations aren’t on the devs, but the fact that nobody can greenlit a AAA Robocop game is beyond me. Even the facial animations are horrid, they can’t deliver any sort of emotion, and the mediocre voice acting doesn’t help. I can’t really judge the story by how much of it I saw, but it seems like it could lead somewhere interesting, somewhere with a lot of heart—so there’s that; but yeah, this is going to be a miss for me.