Several years ago I’ve played Terminator: Resistance, which was a really neat mid-budget title from Teyon that managed to feel more fun in many ways than the big budget titles it borrowed ideas from. Additionally, it was also neat to see the studio try to capture the mood of the first two movies and find a way to make a game that made sense in the universe. Well, this time they are doing exactly the same thing with RoboCop. And while I don’t think it works as well as it did for Terminator, it’s still a very enjoyable simple game.
When I say that the studio is making “the same thing” I mean it quite literally – a lot of concepts, mechanics and even art assets are carried over from the previous game with little to no change. Of course, the main gameplay loop had to be different – the main story of Terminator: Resistance is experienced from the human perspective and due to that has a lot of stealth action. As RoboCop, expectedly, you don’t even crouch and using cover is occasionally recommended, but usually unnecessary. But even this is actually a reuse from the previous project – just from the really fun Infiltrator mode, not the main story or the DLC.
This might read as a criticism, but for the most part it’s praise – I always admire seeing developers being extremely smart about the reuse and they chose a lot of the right things to keep. Art assets occasionally do stick out, even though with new Unreal Engine 5 and usage of Lumen they tend to look better, as good lighting is usually what makes materials work. And it’s also clear that despite using at least some aspects of the MetaHuman models, the face animations and heads themselves (for secondary characters) were mostly reused from Terminator, so they stick out with a very uncanny valley look. But even that – it’s fine, it’s acceptable.
So how does the gameplay work? This is an FPS that is divided into two types of locations/quests. Some areas, just like with Terminator, work as huge open hubs with smaller locations you can teleport to for a specific quest. Some story-driven locations work more like a linear FPS, but even they often have collectibles, optional objectives and entire mini-quests. And performing that optional stuff (along with some other actions, like killing enemies) gives you experience and skill points. Yep, they kept the skill tree as well. And, I feel like this time it wasn’t necessary in terms of providing a meaningful change to how you play the game and seems to be there just to give additional motivation for all of that optional stuff. Here and there you might get a usage out of a skill, but I’ll say upfront – there are like 4 or 5 safes total in the entire game, so I’m not sure why there’s a dedicated perk for finding codes for them.
The story of the game fits neatly, from what I vaguely remember of the movies, between the second one and the third one. It’s cute to see returning characters acting like you expect them to, but also I’d say that this game suffers more than Terminator: Resistance from trying to fit itself full of references and reused ideas. So in the end, it feels more like a weird rehash of the first two movies, instead of a sequel at times.
The optional things and open levels also don’t work quite as well as they did in Terminator, and it’s not like RoboCop is slow or the locations are too big, it’s more that the process of finding some odd collectibles or stumbling upon a mini-quest feels very at odds with how straight and simple the story driven missions are. RoboCop just marches forward like a living tank as stuff explodes around you, you grab bikers off their moving bikes and throw them into landmines and it’s all exciting and fun. But when the game gives you a little part of the city and somewhere out there are things you may find… It’s alright the first time, even if too much of a contrast with those linear missions, but as you keep returning there it gets progressively less interesting. It’s not Deus Ex or even The Darkness situation, where exploring the streets can be as fun.
I do want to give some extra praise to the team for being, possibly, the first commercial release on UE5 to give a mostly consistent and solid looking and working product. It actually launched the same day as the incredible The Talos Principle 2, which also looks and plays well. But RoboCop: Rogue City uses more UE5 features and at the same time lacks some of the artefacts seen in other now available UE5 projects. It runs extremely well (at least on RTX40xx GPUs) too. Also using establishing shots for recurring locations – love it.
But also want to highlight, that this time their game is sadly published by Nacon (previously known as Bigben Interactive), who are known to have applied developer hostile business practices in the past. So I can only hope that Teyon are getting their fair share.
RoboCop: Rogue City is a solid fun FPS that I enjoyed playing. Less than Terminator: Resistance, I suppose. And both of these projects would’ve benefitted from being a tiny bit shorter. But nonetheless, I was happy to see Teyon make another solid mid-budget game. And would love to see whatever they will be developing next.