RoboCop: Rogue City is at its best when it’s violent or mundane

polygon.com:

Developer Teyon has carved out a niche for itself creating video games based on ’80s action classics like Rambo: The Video Game and Terminator: Resistance. Its latest, RoboCop: Rogue City, continues the story of the beloved cyborg of Paul Verhoeven’s ultra-violent satire in a game that’s rife with reverence, but short on refinement.

RoboCop: Rogue City mostly gets at what’s great about RoboCop. The shooting is solid, the satire is mostly on point, and it tries to be as much about the pain of Alex Murphy, the man inside the RoboCop suit, as it is about busting street slime. But Rogue City sticks too closely to the themes and story of RoboCop and RoboCop 2 instead of delivering something truly original.

Rogue City is set after the events of RoboCop 2, a film in which uber-corporation Omni Consumer Products had developed a new RoboCop to deal with the city’s police problem and the spread of a highly addictive designer drug known as Nuke. That drug’s spread and OCP’s still-in-development plan to build the gleaming Delta City over Old Detroit are at the heart of Rogue City’s story, which starts with a gang of Nuke dealers known as the Torch Heads welcoming a new power broker to the city. He’s called The New Guy in Town, uncreatively, and serves as one of RoboCop’s many antagonists in Rogue City.

The early hours of Rogue City are pure RoboCop power fantasy, as Murphy and his partner, Anne Lewis, storm a TV station where the Torch Heads have taken the entire staff hostage. Armed with his powerful burst-fire Auto-9 handgun, RoboCop trudges his way through waves of easily disposable Torch Heads, shredding their limbs from their bodies and popping their heads clean off with an infinite stock of bullets. Objects in the environment