Picked up Robocop on sale for €5 if my memory serves me correctly, and decided to give it a try after hearing good things about the game. As you might've guessed from the game title, we step into the shoes of Robocop (real name Alex Murphy) who together with his partner Anne Lewis, and the rest of Detroit PD try to uncover the identity of the "mystery man", a new crime boss that shakes up the Detroit Crime World.
I have never watched the Robocop movie however, I can definitely say that one of the things that the game does really well is making you feel what's it like to be Robocop, you get to take down criminals with Robocop's iconic pistol Auto-9, and carry out various police investigations using his scan vision to look for clues, I would say that the game has a good balance between investigative work, and shootouts.
Along the way we meet various characters that I'm pretty sure are in the movie as well, and we grow a certain level of attachments to these characters. Throughout the gameplay we can talk to various characters who will perceive us differently depending on what dialogue choices we choose, same applies to how the members of the public perceive Robocop based on whether we choose to be a police officer that follows laws and procedures to the letter or if we choose to bend those a little bit to be more sympathetic towards members of the public.
The gameplay itself is pretty good, Robocop is what I would call a "semi-open world" game. Each level presents us with a small-medium sized map that we can explore and complete side objectives on however once a given level ends, we have no way of going back to that map again. The gunfight feels pretty satisfactory as we take down criminals with the iconic Auto-9, we also have the option of picking up secondary weapons from killed criminals which is a good option at the start of the game as some of these weapons can be a tad bit more powerful than the Auto-9 before you get to upgrading it.
The upgrading of the Auto-9 is really well done as well, along the story we can find various "plates" that can be attached to the Auto-9, the plates can then be populated with nodes that can increase various Auto-9 attributes (Damage, Armor Piercing, Accuracy etc.) by a certain percentage provided by that installed node. At any one time we can have one plate attached to Auto-9 however, switching between different plates is swift and can be done at any time, even in the middle of combat.
Besides upgrading Auto-9, we can also upgrade Robocop himself by earning experience points. We can choose to upgrade attributes that are more beneficial for investigations (Psychology, Deduction) or attributes that are more useful in gunfights (Vitality, Armor, Damage). Although upgrading all attributes to their max level is impossible on the 1st playthrough, it can be easily done on the NG+ which the game also offers. The 2nd perk of the Engineering attribute allows us to open safes without knowing the code to them however, I found this ability quite useless since all there is in those safes is evidence of crime which are needed for a secondary objective that can be easily achieved without having to open those.
The game performs OK on the Steam Deck LED for the most part. When you boot the game for the 1st time the game sets all graphical settings to Low but I decide to set them to Medium instead and the game worked fine for the most part with few frame drops happening every now and again. The game drains the Steam Deck battery in around an hour and 15 minutes which is a standard time for any modern game.
Overall, I had fun playing Robocop Rogue City. The game has a good atmosphere and some interesting characters along the way whose story you're following along with your own. The gunfight and the weapon variety is pretty standard, but it'll definitely feel fun for a long time Robocop fan, it kind of makes me want to watch the movie. Haven't tried the Unfinished Business DLC of the game, but will give it a try once it goes on sale.
