RoboCop: Rogue City – hitting its prime directive (Picture: Nacon)
A reader wishes he’d never bought Modern Warfare 3 but is pleasantly surprised by how good the new RoboCop game is.
It’s always difficult to break yourself out of a habit but I wish I’d managed to do it before buying Modern Warfare 3. I knew it had bad reviews and that it was probably just reworked DLC, but I’d enjoyed the previous two and wanted to see how the story ended. Well, joke’s on me because the story went nowhere and the whole thing was very obviously just jazzed up DLC.
I still enjoyed the multiplayer to a degree, because it’s basically the same as always, but I admit that that was not money well spent (and at the very least I should’ve waited for Black Friday). I’ll tell you what was worth the money though, and that’s RoboCop: Rogue City.
GC’s review of the game was pretty much spot on. It’s certainly not a perfect game, and there are a lot of rough edges, but it’s got heart and ambition and it’s trying to do something different. The fact that it’s also a pretty great sequel to one of my favourite films of all time just makes it even better.
I was very pleased to see that the game was a surprise hit and apparently publisher Nacon’s most successful ever, although I admit I’ve never heard of them before so I’m not sure what exactly it’s up against. I’m very happy it’s successful because not only is it an old franchise, that arguably has only ever had one good entry, but it’s a low budget game releasing at a busy time of year, which is usually a recipe for disaster.
People are pretty wary about licensed games but for some reason they decided to take a chance on this and must’ve found, like me, that it was actually a really clever and unusual game. At its heart it’s a pretty basic first person shooter, although one that’s a lot of fun, with some really fantastic destruction effects. It looks just like the movies, in terms of the set design and the RoboCop vision and everything, and there’s a pretty big skill tree (well, multiple skill lines, really) to unlock.
It’s a solid shooter but it’s a lot more than that because there’s lots of hub worlds where you’re going around doing menial policework, including giving out parking tickets, which is weird but strangely fascinating. There are proper side quests too and lots of people to talk to, that works kind of like a Telltale game where they remember what you said and you can influence the outcome of the story, at least for them.
The plot is whatever but the voice-acting and a lot of the dialogue is really good. Peter Weller is really making an effort to do things properly, not just taking home an easy pay cheque, and while I agree the game could’ve had a bit more of the satirical angle of the movie there is still quite a bit of that and quite a few good lines and the fake radio ads are great.
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Rogue City is a good shooter and a good movie tie-in but it’s also a generally weird and unusual game where you never know what’s coming next, especially when it keeps coming up with unexpected twists and new ideas. Its low budget might be obvious in some of the graphics but not costing the earth is also the reason it can afford to experiment and I’d much prefer that.
Compare that to the soulless banality of Modern Warfare 3 and it’s night and day. Modern Warfare 3 feels like someone typed ‘make me a Modern Warfare 2 sequel in a hurry’ into ChatGPT and left it at that. Rogue City is so obviously made by fans of the movie, with a passion for the game they were making, and the difference is night and day. Now bring on RoboCop Versus Terminator!
By reader Georgie
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A reader wishes he’d never bought Modern Warfare 3 but is pleasantly surprised by how good the new RoboCop game is.