Game review: ‘RoboCop: Rogue City’

January 20, 2025

So I’ve had this game sitting in my Steam library basically since it came out. As a fan of the original two movies, the game interested me. I bought it, but just never made time for it. Well, I made time for it over the past week.

Teyon 100% understood the assignment. If you enjoyed the first two RoboCop movies, you will absolutely enjoy this game. The story takes place between the second and third movies, tying nicely into the movies at both the beginning and end of this game.

This game absolutely nails the look and feel of the movies and has a bunch of callbacks to stuff from the original films. There’s a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor, a lot of locations plucked directly from the movies, and some of the characters from the films feature in this game. They even got Peter Weller to do the voice work for RoboCop! A cut-down Old Detroit features in the game, and the gritty, run-down look is there. The world feels lived-in and is surprisingly fleshed out.

Graphics-wise, the game makes heavy use of a lot of newer Unreal-engine features, particularly lighting effects. The cop-car lights look especially good when cycling around an environment. RoboCop’s appearance is very accurate to the movies—suit color aside—and so on. Graphically, the game is probably not meant for lower-end PCs; my 2070 Super struggled with it at times even at reasonable settings for the CPU and GPU.

Sometimes the lighting effects play a bit oddly…You’ll get some strange, shimmering effects from indirect lighting as you walk towards a wall or similar, but outside that the game looks really good. Character animations are fluid—better than the stop-motion animation sometimes used in the movies—and everything just feels so well-done.

The game also excels sound-wise. Character voices are great. The Auto-9 sounds amazing. ED-209 sounds like ED-209 should! The RoboCop footstep sound is solid! Breaching a door has some real weight to it! It all sounds surprisingly good and helps make the world feel much more alive.

Gameplay is a lot of fun. The combat mechanics, for what they are, work well. You’re a walking tank. You have a stellar pistol, the Auto-9, that you can upgrade to the Moon and back, and a bunch of upgrades yourself that make a big difference in the game. There’s not really an inventory to speak of; you have your Auto-9 and one alternate weapon you can swap out as you come across other weapons, but later on you’ll just use the Auto-9 except for very rare instances. The Auto-9 upgrade system—your gun has a circuit board you can find replacements for, and chips you can plug in to the circuit boards to alter stats in five categories for your Auto-5—does have a major impact on combat. Same goes for the stat upgrades for RoboCop himself; there are several categories that make a large difference in how you interact with the world, fight, and go about dealing with people…And how you deal with people affects how they deal with you and the world. NPCs’ lives will be visibly affected through these interactions.

One thing I almost never used was the special “night vision” mode available to RoboCop. I only found it useful in one part of the game. I did absolutely use the investigation mode, though.

There’s a solid story, too. You investigate reports of criminal activity, pursue main objectives while going on patrol in Old Detroit, attend police briefings, spend time going over your old missions, get wrapped up in the mayoral elections, get optional missions to assist citizens of Old Detroit, and so on. The story is at times uneven in pace; there are some long stretches that feel like nothing but low-level busywork as part of the main plot, but you can usually find side missions to enjoy. The game definitely loads the story up front and near the end, but there’s a lot going on throughout.

Sometimes the NPCs feel stilted and on rails, to the point of idiocy on their part, and that hurts the immersion. There’s one especially egregious NPC death that doesn’t make sense at all and it’s quite jarring vs. the overall well-done world-building that goes on in the rest of the game, but really a bit of stilted, forced NPC shenanigans is one of the few things I can really fault the game for.

This game is probably the most fun game I’ve played in a long time. It’s so much fun that after I finished the game last night I immediately started a New Game + playthrough…I’ve never done that before with a game. The game is relatively short; I wish there was more to do! However, if you like the original RoboCop movies, you’ll like this game. There is some jank—some stilted NPC utilization, the green night-vision mechanic being super gimmicky and mostly useless, the unnecessary chip-merging mechanic, occasional graphics weirdness—but overall this is a very well-done game that will leave you wanting more.

Side note: Teyon is the studio that also did ‘Terminator: Resistance’, another movie tie-in game that’s surprisingly decent. ‘RoboCop: Rogue City’ is quite a bit better than ‘Terminator: Resistance’, but both do their movie series origins justice.

‘RoboCop: Rogue City’ is 100% recommended…If I had to give it a rating, it’d be 4.5/5 stars.