There’s no getting away from it, the PC launch of Crime Boss: Rockay City was far from a success, with it being widely panned and ripped apart by seemingly every journalist that had the (dis)pleasure of playing it. Full disclosure, I didn’t play the PC version of the game, so I won’t be comparing the two versions, but I can say that whilst I went in with low expectations thanks to the aforementioned PC version flopping, the game managed to both exceed these expectations and lower them in equal measure.
Crime Boss: Rockay City – A Mixed Bag of Average
Crime Boss: Rockay City clearly takes inspiration from the biggest action movies from the 80s and 90s, with the action set pieces being unrealistically huge – how many times have you heard of a robbery airlifting loot through a skylight in real life – and the dialogue a new level of B-movie camp. The intention is clear, but the execution is the problem.
The game boasts a wealth of Hollywood talent, with the cast including Michael Madsen, Chuck Norris, Kim Basinger, Michael Rooker, Danny Glover, Danny Trejo, and more, but for all the acting ability and years of experience they share, there’s barely a convincing or believable performance between them. For the most part, they’re clearly phoning it in for the paycheck, except for Kim Basinger and Michael Rooker, everyone else just throws their lines out.
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Unlike The Expendables, this group of former action and Hollywood stars seem less bothered about revitalizing or redirecting their careers, and more on a paycheck they presumably desperately need. Maybe I’m being unfair but just listen to Chuck Norris’ character imaginatively called Sheriff Norris and tell me he cared. The effort from the actors aside, the dialogue is so bad it’s good, with myself and teammates regularly laughing at how unintentionally hilarious it all is. You will laugh, but perhaps not for the right reasons. This is further compounded by the game’s inability to fully lipsync the actor’s performances, resulting in a noticeable delay sometimes that’ll make you feel like you’re watching a dubbed 70s Kung-Fu movie.
Along with the lipsyncing issues, Crime Boss: Rockay City struggles under the weight of what it’s trying to show off graphically. At times the character models and environments look truly next-generation and outstandingly beautiful. At other times you can see pop-in, a noticeable drop in frame rate and a downgrade in visuals. It’s widely inconsistent.
The acting and visuals aside, the game boasts three different game modes for players to sink their teeth into. It manages to tell an interesting story about Michael Madsen’s Travis Baker in ‘Baker’s Battle’, with Baker wanting to take advantage of the ‘King’ being assassinated in the game’s fictional Rockay City, which is inspired by Miami at the very least. You’ll spend your time building your crew, taking over turf, pulling heists, and taking out other crime bosses as they try to fill the power vacuum. The campaign is designed as a roguelike, meaning if you die as Travis Baker during one of the missions in the campaign, that’s it, you restart the whole experience.
Considering the missions have a complete lack of variety or goals (unfortunately something all three game modes suffer from), that’s not necessarily going to be a fun activity, but the ever-present perma-death does give a certain danger to each mission, and will certainly keep you on your toes. This does make the decision not to make this mode multiplayer all the more baffling, in my opinion, as the perma-death nature of it would make the voice chats especially loud and frenzied as you scream at your teammates for help.
The pacing of the campaign is also not especially great, with every five minutes being interjected with another over-the-top acted cutscene, which whilst many look good to look at, none of them really move anything forward narratively, and instead just break up any momentum you’ll have started in the missions before it.
Crime Boss: Rockay City – Multiplayer Frustrations
Crime Boss: Rockay City’s other two modes are multiplayer, with one being a bare-bone quick-play mode called Crime Time, and the other being more in-depth, multi-part missions called Urban Legends.
Unfortunately, these modes feature the same type of missions the campaign features, with no real variety available. Crime Time does include some contracts which can be purchased, but again, these are present in the campaign, but at least this time you can play them with friends. Urban Legends tries to mix the cinematic feel of the single-player campaign with the multiplayer, real-life friends functionality of Crime Time to middling success, but it doesn’t blaze any new trails as such.
When originally announced the game was understandably compared to the Payday franchise, however besides the looting and heisting concept, there’s not a great deal to compare the two. The lack of customization for our characters is surprising, and not being able to plan a heist with your friends is a huge misstep on behalf of the developers. This results in everyone looking similar with a small pool of avatars to choose from, and in my limited time playing online, I already noticed players were completing the heists in the same way, rather than mixing it up with different plans and strategies.
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The most frustrating part of the two multiplayer modes is hands down the poorly-designed UI, which resulted in many missions being canceled, players booting, guns being bought and reset – meaning valuable currency was wasted – and more. Besides all the drawbacks above, the menus were infuriating and the worst part of my time with the game, drawing genuine anger from myself and my teammates. They also froze, with a complete inability to buy guns or change characters at times when I wanted to, meaning I’d either have to close the game completely or start a mission with nothing but a knife and brick just to reset the problem. With the power of the current-gen consoles and the focus on accessibility for differently-abled gamers, this is not acceptable.
The game’s lack of variety isn’t just limited to the missions or avatars, but also the amount of different guns players can choose to outfit themselves with. The general gunplay on offer in Crime Boss: Rockay City is above average, and whilst it isn’t as refined as the Call of Duty franchise for example, it is satisfactory, and the limited amount of guns on offer do handle differently. For a first attempt at an FPS from InGameStudios, this is one aspect they’ve exceeded expectations with.
However, once you manage to get into a mission with a group of friends, or even just one friend, you’ll find the game does have a certain charm to it, and can be genuinely fun, counter-intuitive as it sounds. It needs to not be taken seriously, and certainly shouldn’t be considered to be AAA in any way, shape, or form, but the cinematic and Hollywood inspirations can work if you let them, and there’s something special about breaking into an oddly-placed bank vault and attempting to hold of horde’s of police as you try to get away with a huge payday. You’ll soon find out who your friends are.
The terrible dialogue will make you laugh, the intense and high-action-packed missions will test your coordination and communication skills with your teammate(s), and you’ll find yourself wanting to replay the different levels, again and again, to try and find new solutions, ideas, and ways to accomplish the task. There’s a lot of polish and post-launch updates needed and the game would have benefitted from another six months of development, but there is the core concept of something that could be great here. Whether fans take the time to wait around for that is another matter though, after all, for every No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk 2077, countless broken and unsatisfactory games weren’t given the time to fix themselves. Gamers are a fickle bunch.
4/10
Crime Boss: Rockay City was played and reviewed on a code supplied by Honest PR.
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