Gaming and movies seem to be sharing the same problem lately. Your choices as a consumer seems to range from AAA titles, with massive, multi-million budgets and a team made up of hundreds of talented creators, to way smaller indie studios where the quality may not always be guaranteed and the scope of the project and production values are definitely more limited.
There does seem to be a sense of fatigue from all the AAA games and movies feeling the same, while the indie scene has just so many titles to wade through that it feels daunting to find one that speaks to you. In this pool of tired consumers, there seems to be one sentiment rising to the surface. People are asking where have all the B tier entertainment gone?
After constantly being inundated with safe sequels that feel the same and the constant lack of ingenuity, games stop feeling fresh, unique, and fun. It becomes a war of attrition with the game. This is causing gamers to gravitate towards titles that are taking more risks but still maintain a certain baseline of production values and scope.
Robocop: Rogue City proves this! Now I know what all the naysayers are thinking, “but Ducky, Robocop isn’t a new IP”. Now this would be all the older folks saying this since the youngins probably never even heard of Robocop unless he happened to show up in Fortnite. While it’s certainly true the Robocop game is not based on an original IP, one could argue it was still a risk since Robocop is not the first brand you think of when it comes to a money printing machine.
Also, the game is actually quite solidly made and more importantly, it feels fun. It feels like it hearkens back to the simpler days of gaming where games were just made because someone had a silly idea and went with it.
When you’re playing the game you feel like a tank plowing through weak enemies. Grabbing enemies and then throwing them into each other, televisions and propane tanks exploding in unrealistic spectacles and causing massive damage, punching fools left and right, it’s just a good time.
There’s also a very simplified narrative structure in Robocop: Rogue City. It feels like Baldur’s Gate 3 for toddlers, and I don’t mean this in as an insult. Conversations with people are short and you usually only have a few options to pick from. Sometimes keeping things simple is great. There’s really no need to mistake complexity and convolution for depth and equate it to fun.
The game does have some role playing elements. There’s a large enough city to explore as well as some subquests to carry out. You do gain experience and level up and this let’s you unlock skills on a simple tech tree as well.
While the story definitely has callbacks to Robocop lore, the game would have been equally fun without using the IP. We need more games with smaller budgets (relatively speaking compared to the massive budgets of these AAA titles) that take more risks.
By risk I mean what investors think of as risk, a lower return on investment. We need developers who are free enough to make a game because they wanted to, not because it would guarantee a return on investment. This is why a lot of massive titles from massive companies are turning into always online live service games that sacrifice fun for an experience engineered to be addictive and push the cosmetic shop with overpriced skins.
We need games that have a guarantee of at least a baseline of production value and scope so customers don’t have to worry about taking a risk on an indie developer that may not know what they are doing or bail on the project half way through. A return to games being fun and not these massive undertakings.
This is why smaller scale games that focus on fun over profit are doing exceptionally well nowadays and Robocop: Rogue City is no exception.
Additional Info
Steam Store Page : https://store.steampowered.com/app/1681430/RoboCop_Rogue_City/
Review Score: 93% positive with a total of 4182 reviews as of this writing (12/04/23)
Developer: Teyon
Publisher: Nacon
Release Date: Nov 2, 2023
MSRP: $49.99
Time spent: 2.7 hours
Achievement Score: 0/27
Ducky Obrien 