Reviews
‘RoboCop: Rogue City’ Review – An Authentic RoboCop Experience
Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 film RoboCop has withstood the test of time. A whip-smart satire of the police industrial complex and capitalism, it has a unique and grimy flavor that’s rarely been replicated. And the premise of normal police officer Alex Murphy being turned into an unstoppable crime-stopping machine has an appeal that feels tailor made for video games. Years have passed and the RoboCop franchise has received numerous video game adaptations that range from arcade side scrollers to fighting games. Yet none have captured the feeling of the original film and the balance of style and substance it carried. None have ever made the player truly feel like a one-man war on crime in the streets of Detroit. None have ever really felt like RoboCop.
I’m wildly pleased to say that RoboCop: Rogue City changes all of that.
Developed by Teyon (known for their work on the underrated Terminator: Resistance), RoboCop: Rogue City seeks to fix the past. Not only by putting the players authentically into the role of Alex Murphy himself, but also by delivering an experience in line with the first two RoboCop films. At times, Rogue City even feels like playing a long lost film in the series.
Rogue City puts players in the shoes of Alex Murphy aka Robocop (voiced by a returning Peter Weller) in a story set not long after the events of Robocop 2. Working with his partner Anne Lewis, the tutorial has them storming a new station that’s been taken hostage. This is where Rogue City’s commitment to authenticity begins to shine. While most modern first-person shooter games may put an emphasis on high speed movement and agility, Rogue City sees players become a slow-moving tank. Robocop can’t even jump but that doesn’t take away from the absolute thrill of entering a shootout and taking on damage while delivering out pure violence. Gunfights are chaotic and gory and often feature enemies being turned into a bloody red mist and the environment looking like an absolute warzone after every encounter. RoboCop has a few tricks up his robotic sleeve in the form of “RoboCop vision,” which mimics his point of view from the original films but has tactical use in Rogue City. RoboCop’s Vision allows him to highlight enemies and points of interest in a chaotic environment. In gunfights, this is extremely helpful.
While players will be able to take loads of damage, Murphy is never invincible. You can carry up to 3 repair packs at any given time but to use these you have to be stationary and hold down a button. Even then they only heal a partial amount until you make some focused upgrades. Combat uses basic firearms from pistols to assault rifles and heavy machine guns. Though most have limited ammo, players will always have access to Murphy’s auto pistol that has unlimited ammo and is just as destructive as it is in the movies, able to blow off limbs into a bloody pulp with ease. Murphy is also able to pick up various items and even enemies and is able to throw them with such force that explosions of fire and flesh easily fill the screen before you know it.
Soon after the opening mission is where Rogue City shows its true colors and where I was fully sold on the idea of a RoboCop game. After a brief visit to a wonderfully recreated police station from the films, Murphy is assigned to his first case that takes him to a seedy district in old Detroit. The district is fully explorable and tasks players with patrolling the streets in their own way. In these smaller environments I was able to explore and find other crimes to solve, ranging from murder investigations to stolen car retrievals and random crimes. Make no mistake, Rogue City is not a massive open world with tons to do but Teyon has gone the extra mile to help flesh out their rendition of RoboCop’s world in loving detail.
Investigations are fairly simple and straightforward but their writing stays true to the original films. Player choice also plays a factor into some of these missions. RoboCop has the decision to either issue a warning or arrest someone and that factors into his prime directives of servicing the public trust and delivering justice. Sometimes it feels good to maybe not write that ticket or make an arrest in the name of gaining public trust and seeing how civilians interact with you. I never felt like it made a huge impact on the overall experience but it’s a nice touch nevertheless, and allows for exploration of themes such as gentrification, drug addiction, police brutality and the cult of celebrity.
There’s an upgrade tree as well. Almost out of necessity to mix up the gameplay. It has basic features like increased health but also some interesting additions like an engineering tree that will allow Murphy to get into safes and other lockboxes or a decipher skill that will allow him to notice more in his environment or crime scenes. There’s a good amount of player freedom in the type of build you want but when most situations boil down to a violent and slow gunfight, there’s little incentive to make choices off the beaten path.
Playing the PS5 version in performance mode I never noticed any performance issues that hindered gameplay. Sometimes the framerate would hitch up a tad when there was a lot going on on-screen (happens more often than you think) but it never lasted more than 1-2 seconds. Environments are surprisingly detailed and have reflective surfaces offering a level of detail that is impressive from such a small team. Character models also look fairly well done, especially those that recreate actors and characters from the films in loving detail. It’s just a shame that sometimes the animation and cinematic angles don’t put them in the best light, and at times they look to be puppets on strings in their movement and expression.
So RoboCop: Rogue City isn’t perfect. Far from it. The slow and repetitive combat, and basic investigation work have their novelty wear off after a while. The basic open-hub is nothing you haven’t seen done better in other games and the writing isn’t always the greatest. But I can’t help but be charmed by RoboCop: Rogue City. Teyon set out to deliver an authentic RoboCop experience and with all odds stacked against them, they delivered on everything they set out to do. It’s rare that you even come across a good licensed RoboCop game but it’s even better when you get one that treats the IP with the respect and care that it deserves. For all its faults, RoboCop: Rogue City is very obviously a labor of love. In a gaming sphere where lifeless video games are commonplace, I have to give RoboCop: Rogue City credit for being an outlier that finally delivers on the premise of properly adapting the classic films to the world of gaming.
Review code provided by the publisher.
It’s a day of the month ending in Y, and that means it’s time for another killer shark film. Why? Because they’re inexpensive to make, play into an easy fear, and keep finding audiences willing to give them a spin. The Bay is the latest entry in the shark attack subgenre, and while it’s noticeably better than last month’s Chum, it still struggles to barely stay afloat.
Emma (Francesca Eastwood) and Lani (Dani Oliveros) are best friends who’ve traveled to Thailand for a destination wedding, and a chance encounter at the buffet table leads to an unexpected adventure. Mandal (Alexander Wraith) is a friendly, knowledgeable transplant who connects with nature and makes a living by offering boat tours through the area’s scenic waterways. The trips culminate with the opportunity for tourists to witness a shark feeding with local tiger sharks. The tourists aren’t meant to be the food, obviously, but sometimes accidents happen.
The Bay checks off most of the subgenre’s expected beats – an attractive location, an iffy ensemble of characters, a series of poor choices – but it does a few things differently along the way. For one thing, while we see plenty of sharks in the build-up, the first attack doesn’t happen until past the film’s midpoint. Writer/director Phil Volken fills the time leading up to that attack with engaging enough character beats, some genuine suspense, and an abundance of dialogue about how sharks aren’t typically a threat to people – or threats like people. “Sharks hunt,” says Mandal, “humans kill.”
It’s a bit of foreshadowing, perhaps, but it’s also the film’s presiding theme. Sharks don’t want to hurt or kill humans, but “mistakes happen.” Mandal offers up numerous eco-friendly spiels about the role sharks play in the environment, how overhunting could lead to disaster, and how humans are the ones invading their territory. “Don’t act like prey,” and you won’t be bitten, eaten, digested, and shat out by a shark. Pretty simple, if you think about it.
Trouble starts when they toss a chunk of meat into the water attached to a chain and a large female tiger shark gets caught up in it. Mandal’s sidekick, a local man named Ruhan (Ta’imua), panics and starts stabbing at the thrashing creature. He has a history of being bitten by a shark and is clearly frightened, and as the situation worsens, he becomes a far more active threat to the others’ safety than the actual sharks. That character type is pretty common in these films, but it’s a curious choice to make the film’s sole indigenous member of the ensemble the morally weak link.
To be clear, Ta’imua is playing a local but isn’t actually Thai. He is, however, Hawaiian, and The Bay was filmed off Oahu, meaning he’s the only indigenous representation on both counts. The other three characters, all Americans, are brave and willing to risk their own safety for the group, leaving only Ruhan to put a face to the cruel, selfish humans mentioned earlier in the film. It’s certainly a choice!
His performance is somewhat stifled by the desire to make him seem menacing, but it’s passable. The others are equally okay as performers, but it’s only Oliveros’ Dani who stands apart as a spirited individual worthy of viewer fist pumps. Cinematographer Helge Gerull delivers some attractive landscape shots destined to make you consider a Hawaiian vacation, and composer Gad Emile Zeitune finds some effective aural backdrops for the film’s teasingly emotional moments.
Then there’s the sharks. A major drag on the subgenre these days is the use of cheap CG effects (including the abysmal use of A.I. in Chum), but The Bay sidesteps that problem for the most part. There are real sharks here, lots of them, but they appear to be solely present via stock footage edited into the film. Some CG is used here and there, too, with shots being comped together to tighten the proximity between humans and sharks. Most effective, arguably, are the practical effects used to create fins cutting through the water near the characters.
There’s a sense of grounded reality to the shark kills, and while they’re less showy, they’re weightier as a result. Wounded bodies drift away, and the moment where shark nibbles turn into ferocious feasting feels more inevitable and affecting than sudden or scary. The sole exception to the general quality of those kills is the film’s final shark encounter, which doubles down on the poor choices by pairing a silly CG beat with some poorly matched stock footage.
Pretty much every shark attack movie lives or dies on its presentation of the sharks themselves. There are exceptions, of course, with Steven Spielberg’s Jaws being chief among them – everything about that film, from the writing and acting to the directing and editing, helps make it a masterpiece despite the mechanical shark looking goofy as hell outside of the water – but The Bay isn’t Jaws. It’s not even Jaws: The Revenge. Its live sharks are mildly effective, though, and give it a subdued realism that will likely appeal to viewers averse to CG intrusions. Will that be enough to win them over, though?
“When you enter the ocean, you enter the food chain… and not necessarily at the top,” says an opening onscreen quote from Jacques Cousteau, and something similar could be said for shark attack movies in general. When you make one of these movies, you enter a well-trodden and densely populated subgenre… and you’re all but guaranteed to not be at or even near the top. The Bay is closer to the ocean floor than the water’s surface, and while that still puts it above the bulk of the genre, it’s probably not enough of a reason to step foot in these waters.
The Bay opens in theaters and on demand on July 17, 2026.
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