Robocop: Rogue City

[Starker]

There is a lot to this movie. Rico isn't simple. He is stoic.

Sure contradicts how he behaves in class:



(btw, the teacher here is Michael Ironside AKA Sam Fisher from Splinter Cell)

[demagogue]

Ah, I remember in the first year or two of Twitter I started a spoof Michael Ironside account, and my buddy had a fake Ray Liotta account. The fun we had.

Michael Ironside is the best kind of B-list character actor for that kind of fun. (To me he'll always be Richter from Total Recall before anything else though.) I wouldn't even say people love to hate him; he's genuinely liked as the no-nonsense bad guy. What a hero.

I don't know if my account ever caught on, though, but my buddy had a lot of people taking him as the real Ray for a long time.

Edit: I guess it's also worth mentioning here that it's literally Michael Ironside's character's subjective effect in the movie Scanners that the very same got his nick, if you didn't already know.

[EvaUnit02]

Dead or alive, you're coming with me!

[nicked]

How have they managed to make a Robocop game that looks so... dull!?

[ZylonBane]

Apparently by interpreting RoboCop utterly straight, not even attempting to include any of the satire or over-the-top violence that's what made it memorable in the first place.

This approach worked for Terminator, which was a pure action movie with nothing deeper to say. But not so much for RoboCop.

[Starker]

They certainly captured the "impervious machine slowly walking forward and leisurely mowing down waves of suicidal punks" and "Robocop doing errands for various people and solving cases by slowly walking forward and leisurely scanning stuff" parts of the movie.

[Jason Moyer]

Bitches, leave.

[ZylonBane]

"Bitches leave."

A declaration, not a command. What do bitches do? Bitches leave.

[Nameless Voice]

Well, that does indeed look incredibly boring, especially the combat sections.

[EvaUnit02]

GOTY is almost here!

How have they managed to make a Robocop game that looks so... dull!?

Apparently by interpreting RoboCop utterly straight, not even attempting to include any of the satire or over-the-top violence that's what made it memorable in the first place.

This approach worked for Terminator, which was a pure action movie with nothing deeper to say. But not so much for RoboCop.

Well, that does indeed look incredibly boring, especially the combat sections.

These posts certainly aged like milk after that meaty Steam demo in October, eh?

[SD]

I think it looks terrific. Haters be damned.

My only concern is that Robocop is basically an unkillable killing machine. Feels a little overpowered for an FPS protagonist.

[Tomi]

Most FPS protagonists are basically unkillable killing machines in practice though.

[Jason Moyer]

There is a demo if anyone is on the fence, and it's a really good demo.

[vurt]

Demo was great indeed. Combat is really satisfying, i was worried they wouldn't get that part right because then obviously it would've been an easy skip.

[Jason Moyer]

Yeah, I thought the combat felt *right* for a Robocop game, and it's not even the entire focus of the game somehow.

[Sulphur]

Honestly, the combat was pretty one-note in the demo. It was definitely fun for the first 15 minutes, but after that I felt like I'd seen most of what it could offer. While that speaks to a certain degree of verisimilitude to the source material, I'm not sure hours and hours of just that is going to carry it for me - however, as a package, the demo was good fun. Clearly a love letter to the movies, and a good example of what AA design can bring to the table.

[vurt]

It offers more than most shooters at least. We played games that were just point and shoot for the longest of time and people still play such games today, this has way more than that and even a small RPG system built in, always welcome for me.. It's also praised for its dialogue choices / trees, you can solve things differently depending on your skillset. Good luck finding such depth in 99% of shooters, even modern ones.

Terminator: Resistance was good for sure but this seems better to me.

This is not going to turn someone who doesn't like shooters in the first place into a fan though, it just tries to offer a little more for us who likes shooters + RPG's...

[Sulphur]

Yeah, no. If you're comparing it to the current wave of Doom/Quake clones, that may be true, but modern shooters are pretty cross-genre these days, and even Bulletstorm has more depth than the shooting in this demo. The full game might expand it more, who knows, but I'm appraising it for what it showed me. The good stuff was indeed everything else around the shooting.

[vurt]

I'm not sure what depth to shooting you are referring too, i mean you're probably not going to have 30 weapons to chose from, you're Robocop and they're staying within the realm of what would be Robocop. It limits itself like that for sure, and that's a good thing, well, if you care for the lore. You're not gonna become Harry Potter. I play modern shooters all the time and the demo impressed me.

One thing with the game seems to be its leaning quite heavily into comedy sometimes, though in a quite corny 80's way. I do think i would favor a grimmer tone, going the comedy route is a bit generic.

[Sulphur]

Well, it's a pro and a con, right. You stay completely faithful to the movies, and you get the benefit of the game feeling authentic to something you (might) love. On the flip side, you're essentially going to walk through a shooting gallery throughout the experience, except for the boss fights, I'm assuming, where your lack of mobility will make it more of a tedious hide-and-pop-out exercise.

There's no AI to the enemies to speak of (because they're slimebags, I guess?), there's infinite ammo to the Auto-9, their rifles are merely a small change of pace, there's not much in the way of tactics you can exercise as Robocop (mobility or lack thereof is obviously a part of this), and the level design will by nature have to be constrained to the plodding nature of your walk, making them not particularly interesting to navigate. Props to Teyon for making things destructible as a way to inject excitement into the shootouts, but those are surface-level thrills that wear off given enough of them per encounter. The nearest analogue to Robocop's brand of combat with constrained mobility would actually be a mech game, but you already know that those games made things more interesting by adding the simulation element (heat management, etc.) and configuration options alongside different combat arena variables - but anyway, I digress. I'm merely saying the combat's pretty shallow, but that's okay because the rest of the game seems slightly more ambitious.

[Jason Moyer]

If the game were just the shooting parts, it would have to be pretty damn short to hold my interest. I think it's cool that the action feels authentic to Robocop, but the stuff outside of that is what seems the most fun to me.

[vurt]

yeah, it would've been so easy to make this a completely mindless shooter, it would've been ok to do that for a game about Robocop, but they didn't.

I think'll probably get it when it's 50% off or so, i have too many games in my backlog..

Zylon totally missed the mark btw... i mean damn, they even included a homage to the fan made dick shooting video with Robocop.. for me this type of visceral combat is amazing :P there are many gory games, but this is top tier when it comes to that.

[catbarf]

The shooting in Terminator: Resistance was so-so at best. It was the additional layers of stealth, RPG stat progression, and varying paths through the semi-open-world level design that made it interesting, on top of very good atmosphere.

This seems like a refinement of that formula and I'm cautiously optimistic.

[ZylonBane]

Zylon totally missed the mark btw... i mean damn, they even included a homage to the fan made dick shooting video with Robocop.

Yo, dingdong, my comment above was entirely directed at the official pre-release demo gameplay. I've never said anything about the released version of the game.

How embarrassing for you.

[vurt]

Yo, dingdong, my comment above was entirely directed at the official pre-release demo gameplay. I've never said anything about the released version of the game.

How embarrassing for you.

For you yes, because if you really had played the demo you would've noticed it's totally in line with Robocop and super brutal etc. And very clearly you didn't, or you just refused to pay any kind of attention. The demo is not different when it comes to the "very over the top violence" than the full game.