As someone who has never watched a single RoboCop movie, I can tell that this game is a faithful homage to its source material and 80’s films in a fun first-person shooter format.
My favorite part of the game is how RoboCop controls. Unlike most modern FPS’, your character is a lot more limited in his movement, especially in so far as he can’t crouch or duck behind cover. The lack of these maneuvers, as well as the vast amount of health and armor RoboCop has, encourages the player to be hyper aggressive when fighting enemies. Most of the gunfights take place in cramped rooms or buildings, encouraging you to activate your damage reduction, dash in, grab enemies, throw them around, create explosions, and blast everything before you get chipped down. You FEEL like a cybernetic powerhouse, and few enemies come remotely close to your abilities, especially as you progress.
However, although I do prefer feeling overpowered than underpowered in a game such as this, the difficulty needed some fine tuning. I played on the second hardest difficulty and died only three times throughout. Health is plentiful, and the Shield ability, although only active for a short time, offers such high damage reduction that most encounters don’t even drain 1/10 of your life bar. The difficulty is not helped by the power of the Auto-9, your sidearm which becomes the only weapon you need by the midgame.
Although there are several rifle and handheld firearms in the sandbox, I don’t even remember using over half of them because the Auto-9 is just better. Once you can activate the upgrade modules, this pistol melts through enemies with fully automatic fire, little recoil, a high magazine capacity, and literally infinite ammo. It also can enter a semi-automatic mode, which allows you to snipe enemies in the rare long-range encounters. There is almost no reason to use any other weapon. The grenade launcher and the COBRA gun are the only two that are preferable in certain situations due to their explosive properties, but other than that, the other weapons feel near useless.
However, despite this, the Auto-9 is incredibly fun, and the aggressive playstyle encourages fits well with your pistol. Although the Dash and Shield abilities were the only ones I used, I didn’t feel like I was missing much because the core game loop was so addictive. So much so that the rest of the game felt a bit lackluster.
The story is decent at the beginning and middle, with interesting commentaries on whether RoboCop is emotionally, socially, or legally a human being and how so. However, the third act gets messy, and it wears on its welcome after Wendell’s defeat.
The side missions are mostly positive. The significant subplots with cutscenes and plot relevance, especially the Ulysses Washington’s story about proving himself as a police officer, were decently well-written and entertaining. However, getting to and from these objectives are tedious, as your character can’t run or even dash in the semi-open world. It does unfortunately feel like a walking simulator sometimes.
RoboCop steals every scene that he is in, with Peter Weller reprising his role and offering the best voice acting performance. His model is also superb, looking incredibly detailed on the higher graphical settings. However, the voice acting and appearance of the side characters are mediocre at best. A lot of the lines seem like they were recorded without proper direction, and other than RoboCop, Lewis, and Wendell, have little presence or intimidation factor, especially the Police Chief. People’s arms also just don’t move in the right way. They look too stiff and small, almost like they are dinosaurs. It was really distracting in a lot of the cut scenes.
In summary, with this being my first introduction to RoboCop, it seems to be a tonally accurate homage to the original films packaged as an entertaining FPS power fantasy with a non-revolutionary yet serviceable story to get you from fight to fight. Buy it on sale, it’s not worth $40 for the roughly 15 hours it takes you to complete the game fully.
Rating: B-
