RoboCop: Rogue City gets held back in the lab again

Video games based on movie franchises have long been associated with the words 'mediocre', 'god-awful' and 'cash grab'. Maybe developer Teyon is trying to avoid that from happening again with their upcoming first-person shooter, RoboCop: Rogue City, especially since their previous movie tie-ins, Rambo: The Video Game (2014) and Terminator: Resistance (2019), were critically panned.

Their latest video game based on Paul Verhoeven's well-loved 1987 movie about everyone's favourite cyborg law enforcer has once again been delayed. It was initially supposed to be released in June, but then it got delayed to September, and now it will only be available on Nov 2, 2023. So far, neither Teyon nor the game's publisher, Nacon, has mentioned why they have decided to delay the release, but it is most likely to polish the game further.

RoboCop: Rogue City was recently showcased during Gamescom 2023, and from the coverage I have seen so far, the game just does not look very interesting or exciting. Many of the gameplay showcases showed the player trudging around from one objective marker to another as RoboCop and just endlessly shooting enemies that stand around waiting to get shot.

I understand that it is hard to make a game about a nigh-indestructible robot cop but the overall gameplay just did not seem fun at all. The only saving grace I gathered from the various coverage is the fact that the studio managed to get Peter Weller to do the voicework for the titular character.

Instead of just purely going down the boomer-shooter route, Teyon has mentioned that the game will give players the choice of how to solve missions either through dialogue options or if they choose to use a more forceful or peaceful approach when gathering information from suspects. On top of that, the overall storyline and ending will also change depending on the decisions you have made.

While this might sound like blasphemy to most fans of the original movie, I personally think the 2014 reboot version of RoboCop starring Joel Kinnaman would have made for a more exciting protagonist in a video game because that version of 'Robo was at least more agile and had more gadgets compared to the 1987 version.

RoboCop: Rogue City will be available for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.

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This article was first published in Potions.sg.