When the "free" games are released each month on PS-Plus I always kind of approach them with some level of trepidation because Sony and everyone involved in the gaming industry aren't exactly in the business of doing us favors for nothing. When games end up "free" on PS-Plus there is normally a very good reason why that is happening. Most of the time it is because the studio came to the conclusion that they have already sold as much of the game as is possible and they might as well get more of them out there.
Robocop: Rogue City was a game that I hadn't hear anything about until it was free and I found it reasonably entertaining, although sometimes it was for reasons the creators probably wouldn't have wanted me to.
I was a fan of the original film when it first came out and I suppose that is probably going to be a good thing if you go into this game expecting any sort of enjoyment because it follows the story that I recall rather closely.
The "fun" starts right away for us the gamers, because the voice acting in this thing is extremely campy and bad. All of the voices, including the one for Robocop himself are just awful. I don't know how much they paid the voice actors but if it was more than nothing it was too expensive. It's been a while since I have heard voice acting this terrible. It was so bad it was good and reminded me of how I felt about most of the voice acting in the original Resident Evil.
The game tries to promote itself as a first-person shooter but it really isn't. It's more like an arcade gallery style shooter the likes of which were really popular in arcades since the technology became available. This is where it can actually be kind of annoying to play with a standard controller and I am not even certain if some sort of gun accessory was available for it. I hope so, because that would have made it a lot more entertaining.
After just about an hour of play I kind of lost interest in getting my little pointer to just the right spot to shoot at someone in the distance and honestly, the AI is downright retarded in this. The enemies routinely jump out of cover which makes zero sense but what the hell right? This is Robocop and it isn't meant to be realistic.
I did find that the gameplay kept moving but it quickly became sour as the enemies were basically all the same and they reused certain assets on the enemies a LOT. In just an hour of play basically all of the enemies were the same.
I will give them props for the cinematics quality because this is a tiny studio that developed this game and its not like they had the might of say, SquareSoft behind them to get this done. Teyon is a rather small studio based out of Poland with just one other office located in Japan so yeah, it is impressive that they were able to pull this off on what I would have to image was a small budget.
This doesn't change the fact that the gameplay is repetitive as hell because the only thing you really do is wait for the enemies to break cover (the always do) and then try to headshot them. You will miss often but that doesn't really matter a great deal because you are robocop and can get shot dozens of times and not even slow down.
There are a lot of people out there that are going to say this game is boring and well, there is a lot of merit in that. We have simply gone past this sort of game in modern times and while I appreciated the "throwback" style to the arcade-style games of days gone by, it only entertained me for about an hour. The novelty of the bad acting in the cinematics didn't last long for me either and thankfully they were all skippable, which is what I was doing every time I encountered them after the first 30 minutes or so.
I do know that if I had paid the original price of $70 for this, I would have been really mad. Even if you can't get it for free the going price for this game on Steam or others like it is around $5 or so and honestly, I think even that is a bit too much. This is probably because I have grown accustomed to not paying for games in the past few years though.
So you be the judge about whether or not you want to give this one a look. I wont play it again because it simply doesn't have enough diversity in gameplay for me to stay interested. once you've shot 100 guys in the head you've kind of experienced most of what the game has to offer. While I am sure it gets better later, the moving of the crosshairs across the screen for the 1000th time doesn't really hold its allure for very long.
If you were alive and enjoyed the arcade style shmups of the late 90's and early 2000's, this might have some short-lived appeal to you and hell, it's free, so why not?
