RoboCop: Rogue City (PC) Playthrough

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NintendoComplete

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Published on November 16, 2023 4:19:22 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LsMUe2qcR8

Game:

RoboCop: Rogue City (2023)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 11:59:59

4,714 views

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A playthrough of Nacon's 2023 license-based first-person shooter for PC, RoboCop: Rogue City.

In this video, I play through the game on the normal difficulty level and show all of the side quests and bonus objectives I can. (There are two that seem to be glitched: one involved the secret OCP chests at the steel mill, and the other prevented me from completing the "cunning man" objective at the jail.)

The game is set to the highest graphics settings at 1440p (DLSS Quality, FG on) to ensure that the framerate remained stable while keeping the quality of the recording as smooth and clean as possible. It was played on a laptop running an i9 13980HX and an RTX 4090 (175W, 16GB) with 128GB of RAM.

Here are some timestamps:

6:47 The Channel 9 news station
23:30 Police station #1
43:08 Downtown #1
1:04:16 You are so incredibly shiny!
2:20:43 The slaughterhouse
2:43:14 Police station #2
3:08:51 The steel mill
4:31:19 The hospital #1
4:39:02 Police station #3
4:54:26 OCP Bank robbery
5:17:53 Police station #4
5:31:49 Downtown #2
6:54:18 The Juneberry Mall
7:10:29 Police station #5
7:22:13 The hospital #2
7:31:55 The old factory
7:45:15 Police station #6
7:52:39 OCP Correctional Facility
8:31:56 The hospital #3
8:33:28 Police station #7
8:48:54 Downtown #3
9:48:38 OCP Headquarters
10:14:50 The Detroit Arms Expo
10:31:02 Police station #8
10:37:07 Downtown #4
11:09:33 Delta City construction site
11:30:34 Police station #9
11:40:37 The finale at OCP Headquarters

The RoboCop franchise spans four movies, four TV shows (two live action, two animated), and several comic series and video games. I think most would agree that nearly everything post-RoboCop 2 was disposable, but finally, three decades later, RoboCop: Rogue City brings with it an experience that lives up to the namesake. This is what RoboCop 3 should've been.

Teyon's latest FPS is a glorious celebration of everything that made RoboCop such an enduring icon, and it's a damned good game to boot. There's a lot more to it than mere fan-service, though. Alex Murphy's salvation arc came full circle in the first movie, and despite its missteps, RoboCop 2 largely worked because it attempted to forge its own identity.

Rogue City works for the same reason. It doesn’t settle for being a pastiche of recycled ideas, and it doesn’t try to be a playable version of the films that inspired it. The tone of the plot and the portrayal of Alex Murphy is as different from the movies as RoboCop 2 was from the original film.

As RoboCop tells Pickles at the video store, "you cannot reopen a closed book," and the game stands behind that sentiment. The reimagined Alex Murphy still stands for justice, still questions his humanity, and still sermonizes on how to be a better citizen, but he's more than that. He's chattier and more personable, his humor is more self aware, and he embraces all sides of policework, the mundane included. He's just as comfortable ticketing illegal parking jobs as he is creating gore piñatas out of rioting prisoners at the local jail, but it all feels loyal to the source material. (Okay, except for Lewis. She has been turned into a sentimental mother hen, and it's weird. I don't like it.)

The campaign balances its quiet moments with a string of exciting setpieces that make you feel like you're a bipedal tank. RoboCop isn't quite invincible, but he is an excellent bullet sponge who can swallow grenades as he goes about clearing a room. The heavy controls and the deliberate pacing of the combat form the backbone of this power fantasy, and it's great.

The presentation is also quite good. The movies' settings are faithfully recreated and filled with tiny details to help sell the illusion, the raytraced lighting looks awesome, the voice acting is decent (and Peter Weller!!), and the combat makes perfect use of RoboCop's retro visor HUD with its neon green text and its Virtua Cop-style targeting reticule. The character models aren't so hot, but they get the job done well enough.

The game has some nasty bugs and performance issues (it likes to stutter, textures can take forever to load in, and the game crashed on me more than a dozen times in my roughly 100 hours with it), but the overall package was strong enough to carry my interest through the rough patches.

What I find particularly funny is that RoboCop is a AA game by a B-tier developer, yet it feels better put together than many recent AAA releases. Just compare it to Starfield: it looks better, the story is engaging, the dialogue choices carry some semblance of weight, the skill trees aren't full of throwaway options, the characters are memorable, and you aren't shown a loading screen every 45 seconds - and this was all done on a cutting-edge engine and with a fraction of Starfield's budget.

If you consider yourself a RoboCop fan, this one is a must-play. I'd personally rank it as one of the best games of the year.
_____________\nNo cheats were used during the recording of this video.